There's a Word for It
by eiluned price
Summary: I hadn't liked 17-year-old boys even when I was 17. So what is it about Edward Cullen that's so compelling? Whatever it is, I can't afford to find out.
1. Ein neuer Lauf

_A/N: I'm sure that variants of this story have been done before, but don't tell me their titles – I don't want to be tempted to read them yet. Also, I'm doing my best to use characters that SMeyer mentioned (including some in "Midnight Sun") but as you'll see, I've had to expand their families._

_N.B. for my non-American readers: AP stands for Advanced Placement. These are high-school classes that are theoretically college-level, and at the end of the year, the students take an AP test. If they score high enough, they can get college credit._

_Thank yous to Camilla10, Madeline4994, and Mr. Price._

* * *

Chapter 1: Ein neuer Lauf beginnt

As I drove into the parking lot, I peered though my streaked windshield at the clutch of unconnected modular buildings that made up Forks High. There was something wrong with this town, too cheap or too shortsighted to build a school suitable for a rainy climate even when it was surrounded by the raw material for it. Instead, Forks had decided to throw up vinyl-sided boxes and force students to get wet as they went from one class to the next.

I pulled in a few spots away from a navy S.U.V. from which a beefy man with a buzz cut was alighting. Under his sports coat he had the look of someone who had been muscular 25 years ago.

"Hey!" he called to me as I got out in turn. "Hey, miss, this is the teachers' parking lot. Students' is next one over. Are you here to register?" I looked around, confused, not seeing any distinction between the row of spaces he and I were in, and the next row over.

"I'm good," I told him as he walked closer, seeming not to even notice the drizzle falling on us.

He stared at the "Title IX Rules" emblazoned on my long-sleeved T-shirt, at my jeans, at my old red Civic as if they were personal affronts, and then his face cleared.

"Oh, you're the new English teacher," he said. "I should have guessed from the Arizona tags." He tilted his head toward the cactuses on my license plate.

"Bella Swan," I said, offering my hand. I wasn't offended – with my ponytail and scrubbed face, I was probably destined to be carded at every bar until my dying day.

"Bruce Clapp. Welcome to Forks," he responded, shaking. His fingers were fleshy and damp.

"So, can I make a guess about you?" I asked, and he shrugged.

"It's only fair, I suppose."

"Gym teacher?" He nodded. "College football player?" He nodded again, pleased. "What position?"

"Tight end. For Whitworth University." His smile faded as he saw my blank expression. "It's in Spokane."

"Oh, okay. I'm sorry, I haven't been much out of Arizona." I decided not to add that I made an effort to avoid football. I opened the back of the Civic and started pulling out a mop and bucket.

Bruce Clapp shook his head at me. "You won't need those," he said.

"But it's Teachers' Work Day. I have to clean my classroom." It had been a necessity in my school in Tucson during the teachers' prep week. Even in the short break between summer school and the start of the new academic year, grit coated everything.

"Nope. The custodial crew does a good job here." He cast a critical eye on my clothes again. "You might want to cover up that shirt. We _do_ have a dress code."

"Oh, I didn't know, thanks," I said, grimacing, grabbing a black cardigan from the car and buttoning it over my offending T-shirt. When I finished, Bruce Clapp tilted his head again, this time toward the other end of the parking lot.

"We're all meeting in the gym," he explained, and I followed him to one of the beige modular buildings, feeling as if I had already started my new job on the wrong foot.

This was not what I had expected.

* * *

And it certainly wasn't what I had planned. It was less than two weeks ago that I had set off from Tucson with Raquel, my roommate, teammate and best friend, in the Civic that Bruce Clapp glared at, our bikes on top and most of the rest of our belongings – most crucially, Raquel's paintings and my cooking equipment - being shipped up to our new home in Seattle.

Raquel had a job funded for a year, maybe two, at a nonprofit arts education group and had landed a cheap apartment in a sort of artists' commune in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. To get in, you had to be pretty serious about your art, and nonartistic nonromantic roommates weren't allowed. So I was going to be sharing it with her as her fake girlfriend, a subterfuge I had objected to, but only for the ethics of it. I didn't mind being a lesbian for a while – it wasn't as if I thought some great romance was awaiting me in Seattle. If either of us was going to slip up, it would be Raquel, with her lithe figure and spark, who attracted men like an open soda can attracts wasps.

As for me, I had a job too, teaching ninth-grade English at a large school in the Central District, an easy ride from Capitol Hill. What I didn't have yet was a contract, but my new principal, Janine Varner, told me that was typical for the slow-moving Seattle School District.

So I pushed aside my worries about that and Raquel and I had a blast driving along the California coast. We swam in Malibu and shopped at the Hollywood farmers' market – oh, my brown eyes turned green with envy at the spreads of berries and citrus and nuts, the oysters and the slushies - and shouted along to that Robyn Hitchcock song skewering our new home: _Viva Seattle-Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac/They've got the best computers and coffee and smack/Hendrix played guitar just like an animal/Who's trapped inside a cage/And one day he escaped…_

Didn't matter that Hendrix hated Seattle. I was thrilled to be leaving Arizona, leaving behind sandstorms and heat and my dad, police chief of my dusty tiny hometown in the desert. Chief Charlie Swan, who kept me stuck in Arizona because even a prime candidate like me – a bilingual cross-country team captain and school newspaper editor from Nowheresville with good SATs and a sad backstory - can't afford to go out of state for college if her father won't complete the financial aid forms.

Just to see if I could do it, I filled out the Common App and the Dartmouth supplement. A few months later, I put the acceptance letter under a magnet on the refrigerator. Charlie didn't say a word to me about it, and I went to the University of Arizona, where I could qualify as a teacher in four years.

UA wasn't all bad: I met Raquel on the cross-country team, and I was quickly drawn into the circle of art and music students that she had gathered around herself. We became such good friends that I was willing to cool my heels teaching in Tucson for a year while she finished up college, and more than willing to follow her wherever she found a job.

And it was because of Raquel that I discovered what I really wanted to do with the time allotted me on earth, and it sure as hell wasn't teaching high school. But that would have to wait a couple of years.

In the meantime, I was looking forward to living in Seattle, with its concerts and water views and busy sidewalks. When we arrived, we dropped our luggage off in our new apartment and took advantage of the dry August night, walking up to Molly Moon's for ice cream, eating salted caramel scoops and watching bearded guys playing bike polo in the park across the street.

We even ran into the graphic novelist who was on the commune admission committee, a sweet Chinese-American guy our age named Ben, when we strolled in front of the gay bars on Pike Street. As he welcomed us to town Raquel wrapped her arm around my waist.

"You're going to be sorry when you develop a wild passion for Ben, but he ignores you because you have a girlfriend," I teased her when Ben went on his way.

"Nah, he's too short for me," she said.

"You are _so_ picky."

"Yeah, I'm going to take relationship advice from _you_." Raquel snorted before adding with mock pretentiousness, "Besides, I need to concentrate on my _art_."

"Okay, Motherwell, let's go home," I said, knowing how much she hated that painter. "We're going to have a lot of boxes to unpack tomorrow."

But I never got a chance to unpack even my suitcase. My cellphone's ring woke me up the next day, and as soon as I heard Janine Varner's voice, I knew it was bad news. The contract wasn't coming, she told me, because the district had belatedly decided to close a school, and she was going to have to give my job to one of the displaced teachers. Which was how it should be, but even so I was feeling screwed over.

"I do have some good news, though," she said as I sat up in my sleeping bag and tried to figure out how my checking account would absorb this blow. "Or possibly good news, depending on how invested you are in living in Seattle. I just got a call from my old high school, and the new principal there is looking for an English teacher. One of his suddenly walked into his office and retired."

"Your old high school?" I asked, uncertain what she meant.

"The one I graduated from. My uncle teaches math there, actually. It's in Forks – do you know it?" she asked. When I told her no, she went on, "It's about three hours away, on the Olympic Peninsula. Forks itself … well, Forks is not the prettiest town in the world, but the ocean and mountains around it are beautiful. The school is about 300, 350 students, mostly white, but more and more Latinos. Let me look up some data here …."

A computer keyboard clicked in my ear. "Okay, a lot of subsidized lunches - the casinos just don't pay enough. What else … oh, about half the kids sign up for college, mostly for Peninsula, the community college around there. Huh, they had a good year last year - three got into University of Washington, one got into Western Washington. Your class size will be smaller than here in Seattle, so that's something. I mean, it's probably better than going on the subs list, which is pretty much your only other option at this point."

"Yeah, you're right," I said, shuddering, as Raquel, awake now, mouthed, "What's going on?" from the other sleeping bag. Substitutes, God bless 'em, had the worst jobs. And what other way was I going to support myself in Seattle?

"Great," Janine Varner said briskly. "I'll fax your documents to Forks, and you'll get a call."

An hour and a conversation later with Forks High's novice principal, I had a job in a town I had never heard of, much less seen.

* * *

I followed Coach Clapp to the gym, where folding chairs had been set out for the 30 or so staffers. The man who hired me, Bob Banner, looking serious in his khakis and navy blazer, narrowed his eyes at my jeans before introducing me to my new colleagues. The inspection finished, I gratefully dropped out of sight and into a chair next to Janine's uncle, Jerry Varner, and another young teacher. Banner went over rules and procedures I was too new to know – the honor code, the use of honorifics and last names even for students, the schedule for lunchroom duty and, of course, the dress code, which barred both jeans and T-shirts for teachers.

The young teacher next to me was Angela Weber, a soft-spoken brunette with long legs peeking from her dress-code-approved skirt. She was a local girl and Forks High grad who was taking over Banner's spot in the science department. And, it turned out, the daughter of a minister.

"Oh, yeah? What kind?" I asked as she started showing me around the school, my designated tour guide

"We're Lutherans," Angela said. "In Forks, it's either us or the Pentecostals."

Lutherans I could probably deal with. "When's the service?"

"Ten. Oh, Bella, would you like to teach Sunday school? We could use some help with the kinder –"

"No," I cut her off.

"Really? You don't want practice for the future?"

I crossed my index fingers as if I was warding off evil. "No kids for me. High schoolers are bad enough. Don't you have a food pantry or something instead?"

"We do," she said with a smile. "Though why don't we wait to see if you can stand listening to my dad before we sign you up?"

By now, the sun had succeeded the drizzle, producing a sort of steamy miasma I had never seen in Arizona. I followed Angela to the administrative building, where she led me to the teachers' lounge, a luxury that my crowded school in Tucson didn't have. There was a coffee maker and a refrigerator, and bulletin boards that were covered with union notices and district announcements, as well as a yellowing newspaper clipping that caught my eye. I stepped closer to read it.

It was a story from a tabloid about a teacher in New York who had fallen for a student in her 11th-grade remedial math class, a student who happened to be an underwear model. She had lost her job because of their affair.

There was a picture of the young man in question taking out the garbage, biceps on display, and yelling at the reporters gathered outside the house he shared with his older lover and their baby. I scrunched up my face in distaste. This teacher may not have been as reprehensible as, say, Mary Kay Letourneau, preying on a sixth grader in her class, but still …

"Ugh, I didn't like 17-year-old boys even when I was 17," I said. "Why would you want to be with one when you're 30?"

Angela looked wistful for a moment, then shrugged. "I'm told the Clapp put that up after hearing Mrs. Cope rhapsodize one too many times about the Cullens," she said.

"Who're they?"

"They're what counts for exotica in Forks. They came from Alaska a couple of years ago, and they're amazingly smart. I saw their work when I was student teaching here last year." Angela considered this a moment, shifting in her flat shoes. "Three of them just graduated, but you'll have Edward and Alice in your AP class."

"They're twins?" I asked, trying to figure out five kids in two years.

"Well, those two aren't, but it's a mix of foster kids and – oh, Mrs. Cope, what timing! You're an angel!" Angela exclaimed as the lounge door opened and a middle-aged red-haired woman walked in carrying a stack of papers. The school secretary, I recalled from the introductions.

"Shelly, remember?" she corrected Angela, and started to pin up sheets of paper.

"Sorry, it's hard to break the habit," Angela said. "When I was in school here, all the teachers seemed so old, but I realize that some of them were the same age I am now, and it's difficult to believe that I'm like them. I feel so young and inexperienced, and they looked so grown-up."

I nodded, knowing how she felt. Shelly Cope finished her task, and I could read the headings on the four sheets of paper she'd put on display: _Homecoming Dance_ said the first one. _Prom_ said the last. But Angela was writing her name on the second sheet, and the third.

"I'm signing up to chaperone the holiday dance and the girls' choice one," she said, and Shelly Cope hummed in approval. "They tend to be less rowdy than homecoming. And definitely less of a pain than prom. Do you want me to put your name down too? You really don't want to be assigned to prom."

I was still focused on the girls' choice idea. "You guys have a Sadie Hawkins dance here?" I asked. "Did I get caught in a time warp?"

"Yeah, we do," Angela said. "It's a goofy tradition. But it's the easiest dance to police, since the girls are in charge and tend to be less stupid than the boys."

"Fine, sign me up," I sighed. There had been no dances in my old school. My students were too busy working at jobs licit and illicit to have time for such frivolity.

That done, we started to head toward Building 3, which housed the English classrooms. On the way out I stopped at a display case in the hallway next to the main office that held the usual photographs of kids who'd died while they were students here and old trophies and a picture of last year's graduates lined up on the bleachers of the football field, smiling broadly and squinting against the sun.

"Are the Cullens here?" I asked Angela, my voice quiet. Shelly Cope had only just stepped into the office.

She scanned the photo and shook her head. Next to it was another picture, of a shyly smiling girl, labeled "Our Valedictorian – Hope Weber."

"Is she related?" I asked, pointing.

"My cousin. She's starting at Western Washington next week."

"Good for her. So none of the brilliant Cullens got good enough grades to be valedictorian?"

Angela laughed. "Oh, no, they have perfect grades, perfect SATs. The problem for them is that gym is included in the G.P.A., and they don't do well in gym."

My hazy image of the Cullens sharpened to a group of clumsy ectomorphs, but then Angela added, "Bruce Clapp was _so _furious that the big one, Emmett, wouldn't go out for football. He looked like someone who could break an opposing lineman like a twig. I've never seen them in gym class, but all of them are so graceful I can't imagine that they're not good at sports. I mean, I coach the volleyball team, and I would have loved to have had Rosalie – I bet she would have had a vicious spike. Anyway, the Clapp probably marks them down out of spite. So, almost perfect grades, I should say. You'll see."

A few minutes later Angela and I were contemplating my new classroom, the former center of operations for one Val Berty, absconding 12th grade English teacher. It was like countless classrooms across the country: industrial vinyl floors, light strips, pale wood desks, whiteboards, a line of windows along one side, a complete absence of architectural interest. A faded yellow raincoat hung from one of the hooks in the back of the room.

"It's not much, but here it is," Angela said, sounding almost embarrassed at its plainness.

I snickered. "You know, I had to share a classroom in Tucson. So this is a step up for me."

"Huh. I think Val Berty had these pictures up when I was in AP English," she said, shaking her head as she surveyed the walls, decorated with black and white film stills.

"Based on their age, he probably had them up when your _parents_ were in his class," I said. There was Marlon Brando and Richard Burton as Mark Antony, Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, as Henry V, as Richard III, as Mr. Darcy, as that jerk Heathcliff.

"Yah!" she said, in that Pacific Northwest way I'd been noticing. "I bet he did! I always wondered why he didn't at least put up someone we'd recognize, like Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo." She sighed a little.

I wondered too, since I was beginning to suspect that Val Berty was a confirmed bachelor, but I didn't say that. "Eh, he's too boyish looking," I said instead, responding to her admiration of young Leo, realizing I sounded a bit like Raquel. "Maybe I can find a picture of Idris Elba to put up. He's done Shakespeare, I think."

"Not bad, though I have a weakness for nerdier types," Angela said as I walked over to Val Berty's old desk. The wall calendar behind it still said June 2011. I ripped off the bygone months until September appeared.

"Berty was really in a hurry to leave town, it looks like," she went on.

"Yeah, what happened there?" I dropped the paper into the recycling bin by the desk.

"We don't know!" Her hands waved around in emphasis. "I would have guessed he'd die teaching here, but no. He got some sort of sudden inheritance – a house in England, near Shakespeare's hometown, I think?"

"Stratford Upon Avon?"

"That's it. And off he went. It threw Bob Banner in a panic, he's so nervous about taking over from our old principal, Mr. Greene. He was really relieved to find you." She winked at me. "Seattle's loss is our gain, I guess."

"I guess," I said, though I wasn't at all sure that it was my gain as I looked around this unprepossessing room again. But as Bruce Clapp promised, it was clean. And it was all mine.

* * *

My fellow English teachers were in their late 20s or early 30s and looked exhausted even before the start of the year. They had kids at home, and second jobs to help pay for them – Jeff Mason, tall and prematurely balding, did the books for his wife's childcare business; Natalie Marshall made sea-glass jewelry for Etsy. Not for the first time, I was grateful to be child-free.

"Why isn't one of you taking over 12th grade?" I asked them as we met in Jeff Mason's classroom, sitting in student desks arranged in a little circle, looking over the class rosters, discussing the troublemakers. After all, the senior-year classes were smaller and the students presumably more mature.

Jeff, who taught half the juniors and all of the sophomores, winced a little. "I probably will pull seniority on you next year and take the 12th grade," he said. "But Val left so late this year, and I don't have the time to put together a whole new set of lesson plans." I could understand that – even unfettered as I was, I was going to have difficulty getting ready to teach two regular 12th grade classes, plus AP, plus two 11th grade classes.

"And with the new Common Core standards coming up, we'll all have to revamp our lesson plans anyway," Natalie added. "I wouldn't mind a change myself. So you can do ninth next year."

"But in the meantime," Jeff Mason slid two stacks of file folders onto my desk, "you can get started with this. Here are copies of my 11th grade material," he said, tapping one, "and that's Val's." I opened that folder to see a sheaf of worksheets and lesson plans, most of them creased and soft with age.

"Thank you _so _much," I said, giving him a relieved smile. Since I had spent my summer preparing a ninth-grade curriculum, I had a crapload of work ahead of me, and this would be an immense help. I glanced at Berty's syllabus and looked up at Jeff in surprise. "The 12th graders do 'Romeo and Juliet'? They haven't read it already?"

Jeff shrugged. "Val was the head of the department, and he liked to keep most of the Shakespeare for himself." Maybe that explained why the man had rushed off so eagerly to England to claim his inheritance. "Have you taught any?"

"Not really. My students at New Arrivals High usually didn't have enough English to tackle it. We mostly did grammar and read 'Of Mice and Men.' So do you want to add more Shakespeare for the juniors, spread it out?"

Jeff and I talked about our shared 11th grade curriculum while Natalie went off to her own classroom. One of early units, I saw, was on folklore, with a section on local myths and legends. "Who do you get to talk about local folktales?" I asked.

"I'll take care of that. Somebody from the Quileute reservation comes every year," he said.

"Oh, I didn't really realize there were reservations here," I said, feeling stupid since I came from a state full of reservations, including the one Raquel's family lived on. "I should have figured that out – I saw all those casino billboards with totem poles when I drove here."

"Yeah, the Quileutes are the closest," Jeff said, handing me a list of the Everbind Classics books in the English department storage closet.

"Do they speak a tribal language?"

Jeff gave me a dubious look. "No, they speak English," he said, as if I were little dim.

"Um, I meant, are the people on the reservation fluent in Quileute or whatever their tribal language is?" I asked.

"Dunno. Never heard anyone speak it."

I nodded, but the seed of an idea started growing in my mind. Maybe my stay in this town could be useful.

* * *

When Work Day was over, I headed west out of town to my newly rented house, the barren prairie of Forks ceding to forest. I remembered to turn right after the trailer that had a stuffed spotted owl hanging from a noose, legacy of some battle between loggers and conservationists.

There was a guy in my front yard with a lawn mower when I pulled into my driveway. "Hello?" I called out as I stepped out of my car, eying the stranger in confusion. He had short, wavy blond hair, and jeans but an unbuttoned plaid shirt, as if it were 20 degrees warmer than the thermometer said. Also, when she'd shown me the house, Jessica Stanley hadn't mentioned anything about a yard service.

My visitor cut off the engine of the mower.

"Yo!" he said as if he had every right to be on my weedy lawn, and sauntered over to me. I thought he might be flexing his pecs, which were, to be honest, considerable. "I'm Justin. I figured it was time to give this a trim."

I stared a him a moment. "Justin … Stanley?" I asked.

His cocky expression slipped a little, as if he were worried that I had already heard of him, because whatever I had heard, it couldn't have been good. "Yeah?"

"You're Jessica Stanley's … brother?" I asked, trying to make connections. Jessica hadn't mentioned a brother either. On the other hand, she hadn't talked about much of anything besides herself.

"Uh, no, a cousin. I live across the street." He jerked his head toward a McMansion with pillars and a Juliet balcony attached to a squat box, lipstick on a pig. "And I hear that you're Isabella." The cockiness returned, joined by a smarmy smile. "Or do you use Bella? Or –"

"Ms. Swan," I interrupted him. "I use Ms. Swan. And you're in my 11th-grade English class, Mr. Stanley." I had seen his name on my roster, and had been informed that he was the best player on the football team and thus was protected by the Clapp, but I had failed to ask how he was related to my new landlady.

Whoever had told him my name hadn't told him my job, and I could see him visibly try to process the news that the new neighbor he was trying to hit on would be grading him for the next 10 months. Hoping that his embarrassment wouldn't turn into resentment and defiant behavior, I seized my chance to escape my inappropriate proximity to his hairless chest.

"See you in class next week, Mr. Stanley," I said, and marched to my front door.

Ugh. Seventeen-year-old boys.

* * *

_Chapter title: "A new run begins," from the song "Ein Neuer Tag," by Juli._

_Another A/N: In my other stories, I put BxE in real places – ie, real hotels, real restaurants, real college buildings, real streets, even though I often don't name them. In this one, though, a lot of what I write about the Olympic Peninsula will be true true, some of it will be SMeyer-universe true, and some of it will be made up._

_Also, I've never taught high school, so I'm getting guidance from my sister, who's a teacher in Seattle. What happens to Bella here is inspired by something that happened to one of her colleagues last year. But if the teachers out there see something horribly unrealistic, let me know._


	2. Javani

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to Smeyer._

_Thanks to Camilla10 and Mr. Price for reading, and to TwilightMomofTwo for language help._

* * *

Chapter 2: Javani

Bob Banner had given me a list of the few rentals in Forks in my price range, and this had been the last one I visited since it was some distance out of town. I didn't have high hopes for it; there was a newly renovated duplex near enough to the high school that I could walk to work, and that seemed a smarter choice.

This place was a small, plain wood-frame house that had been built during one of Forks's brief bursts of prosperity, when lumber was in high demand in World War I. My hopes that it would have a charming old kitchen had been dashed when I saw the avocado appliances and harvest-gold laminate counters: an unfortunate '70s remodel.

It was the only house that was being shown by a real-estate agent. Jessica Stanley was my age, with curly dark hair and the sort of cleavage that must have brought her a lot of attention in high school. Normally, she told me, she wouldn't do such a small job, being the super-successful Seattle real-estate agent she was, busy dating lawyers and other super-successful real-estate agents. But she was handling this as a favor to her mother, who lived across the street and had bought the house when old Mrs. Sawyer went into the nursing home.

She was also the sort of conversationalist who would pause in her stream of babble to ask a question, hear one word of the answer and start going again. Jessica chattered as she pointed out the dimensions of the kitchen – as ugly as it was, it was pretty big – and continued as she trailed me upstairs to the bedrooms, her high heels like bullets on the wooden steps.

"Forks must be a big change from Arizona, huh?" she said. "God, I'd love to be somewhere really warm and sunny for a change. It might be fun for you here, though. The guys are going to be all over you, new girl in town." Her voice took on an edge at those last words.

I grunted, not really paying attention. We had made it to the front bedroom, and from the window I could see Jessica's mother's house. The back bedroom was bigger, overlooking an unfenced yard that was surrounded by forest, no houses in sight. I opened the window and leaned out a little over the eaves of the back porch, intrigued. If that was what I thought it was …

"Is there a trail back there?" I asked Jessica, waving toward a gap in the woods.

Jessica got into real-estate agent mode, ready to paper over any problems that would keep her from closing a sale. "That's part of network of trails in the forest, but we've never had any trouble with people coming on our land," she said. "If it bothers you, we can put up a sign and maybe a gate?"

I turned back to Jessica and shook my head. "No need. I'll take it."

* * *

Now I shut the door on Jessica's bare-chested cousin and went inside, navigating around boxes of books and cooking supplies, my bike and my mother's old cello, and the futon sofa that was pretty much my only furniture, unloaded only yesterday. I had lucked out because the Stanleys hadn't yet thrown out Mrs. Sawyer's old wooden kitchen table and chairs, so at least I had a place to eat and mark homework.

I would need to put curtains up, a task made more urgent by the knowledge that not just my landlady but also a student who didn't need to see me doing my after-run stretches in my underwear were living across the street.

Indeed, the only decorating I had done yet was to hang Raquel's paintings. She focused on portraits, and for her senior-year project had made a series of small, square paintings of our circle of friends. I had grouped them together in the living room, and I paused to look at their familiar faces – all friends, some friends with benefits, none of them boyfriends.

There was a reason Raquel wouldn't take relationship advice from me – though to be honest, she was almost as wary as I was, having seen too many girls from her hometown drop out of college or never even go because of importunate boys and unexpected pregnancies. Neither of us wanted to be stuck in a small town as our mothers had been … of course, here I was right now stuck in a small town. But not for long.

Though I had protested, Raquel had given the paintings to me before I left Seattle, saying that I might need the company in the lonely forest.

There was another, larger painting by Raquel off to the side. She had made it for me as a birthday present last year. It showed a young woman with laughing eyes and a heart-shaped face, a toddler in her lap. The painting was based on an old photograph I had: I was the toddler, my mother holding me, Charlie at her side. Raquel had depicted all of Renee, but only the top of my head. She had known without asking that I wouldn't want Charlie painted at all.

It was childish of me, but I had a sense of satisfaction every time I looked at the painting, quite apart from its demonstration of Raquel's considerable skill.

I went upstairs to change, and a few minutes later I was out the back door, on my way to explore the woods in the hours of light remaining. I took my running watch and, not sure how well the trails were marked, my compass and headlamp.

It was so different from Arizona. There were pine forests there, but nothing like this. As the elevation rose and dipped, a stand of young spruce gave way to maples and alders heavy with moss in an infinite range of greens. Ferns crowded the single-track trail and brushed my waist. I crossed a logging road as well as many streams, just trickles now, that would swell when the rainy season started. Patches of clear-cut slash gave me glimpses of the mountains that you couldn't see from Forks proper. Squirrels chattered and birds called; deer and other animals I couldn't identify had left their prints on the trail.

I returned home as dusk fell, elated and idly scratching my new collection of mosquito bites - nasty bloodsuckers always got me. I wasn't a cross-country star, and probably made the University of Arizona squad mainly because the athletics department desperately wanted women to balance the numbers on the football team under the federal Title IX requirements. Neither Raquel nor I could compete with the Kenyan women who got the cross-country scholarships. But I knew I would love running here, and I looked forward to showing Raquel the trails when she visited.

The days following were busy, which had the advantage of leaving me little time to feel lonely. Living with the taciturn Charlie had been almost like living alone, but not quite, and living with Raquel had been like a constant house party. So I wasn't used to the stabs of unease I felt sometimes in this house on the edge of an isolated town. I prepared lesson plans, and read "The Prince of Tides," the summer book for seniors; I got supplies in Port Angeles; I ran in the woods behind my house.

Angela invited me for a barbecue at her parents' house on Labor Day. There I met her twin brothers, Isaac and Josh, skinny and polite, who were in my 11th grade classes, as well as Our Valedictorian Hope Weber, nervous about starting her college career the next day.

I too was nervous about the first day of classes, which was gray, humid and exceptionally hot … for Forks. By the end of the morning I was regretting my choice of skirt and sweater, conservative to make up for my dress-code faux pas on my first day and too heavy for the temperature today. But the students were attentive and well-behaved.

And not a nonconformist among them, it seemed. They dressed as if they all shopped at the same mall, a mall whose stores sold only jeans and T-shirts with brand-name logos. _American Eagle, A__é__ropostale, Pink, Hollister_. By lunchtime the lyrics from a song I hadn't had to think about since middle school was an earworm running incessantly through my brain.

_When I met you I said my name was Rich/ You look like a girl from Abercrombie and Fitch_

Blech. Maybe lunch would get that out of my head.

* * *

"They're _heeee—eeeere,_" Bruce Clapp announced at the teachers' table in the cafeteria, which already reeked of grease and chicken fingers and government surplus. "The creepy Cullens are _heee-eeeere_." He jerked his head to the left, but all I could see was the salad bar I was never going to use, and beyond that, the top of someone's wild reddish-brown hair.

"Stop it, Bruce." Barbara Goff, the Spanish teacher, put down her spoon with a clatter as she scolded him.

He ignored her. "Bella, have you dealt with the Cullen kids yet?" he asked me.

"Uh-oh," Angela muttered under her breath next to me.

I shook my head. "My AP class is after lunch," I said.

"Well, prepare yourself. Don't be surprised if one of them looks like they want to tear your throat out."

"Bruce!" Several voices now joined Barbara Goff's in admonishment.

"Bella's lucky she has to deal with only two of them, " Bruce Clapp said, shrugging. "Besides, I'm not the one sleeping with my sister."

"They're not really related," Angela said, her tone severe.

"But they all live together," he said. "Five teenagers, all going out with each other. It's weird."

"It's sweet," Barbara Goff said, a little dreamily, and I had to suppress a snicker at her tone. "They've lost their parents and been in foster care, and then they meet their soulmates in their new home – Alice and Jasper, and Emmett and Rosalie, they're obviously made for each other."

Bruce Clapp snorted. "Maybe if they weren't all busy being busy with their sisters, they'd do something useful like play sports."

Angela leaned over to whisper to me, "When I was in school, I never imagined the teachers talked about students this way."

"Me either," I said, cutting into a tomato slice with my fork. "I hope our students don't talk about _us_ like that."

* * *

I misjudged how long I needed to get back to Building 3 from the cafeteria, and by the time I arrived in my classroom, my 15 AP students were already in their seats. Fortunately, I had left a "do now" assignment on the whiteboard, and they were quietly writing. I dropped my lunch bag into my desk drawer, grabbed my clipboard with the class roster, and turned to face my students as the bell rang.

A boy with wild reddish-brown hair and a girl with spiky dark hair were toward the back, a little off to the side of everyone else.

The Cullens.

Holy fucking shit. I wish I had been able to prepare myself, as the Clapp had suggested, and not because the Cullens looked as if they wanted to tear my throat out. They were both stunning, the boy especially, possessors of a pale beauty that seemed alien not only to Forks, but to the entire planet, cool and composed as the rest of us wilted in the heat. The girl beamed at me, light hazel eyes sparkling, while the boy stared at me as if I were some unidentifiable species of insect. I flushed hot under his scrutiny, and realized that I was staring too, and in a most improper-for-a-teacher way. I walked to the windows and cranked one open, welcoming the breeze on my cheeks.

I turned back around, and avoiding the gazes of the distracting Cullens, welcomed my new students and said, "I know it's the rule here to use honorifics and last names, but I'd like to know what first names you prefer, so tell me as I do the roll call." I looked down at my roster. "Alvarez?"

"Gracie," came the answer from a brunette with Abercrombie emblazoned on her faded T-shirt and an accent in her voice. Mexican, I guessed, born Graciela.

"Banner?"

"Brett." Principal Bob's son had Fitch on his shirt.

"Crowley?"

"Tiffany." _Victoria's Secret._ Well.

"Cullen, A.?"

"Alice," a beautiful soprano announced, and I finally looked in the Cullens' direction again. Jesus. The only logos on this girl's clothes were discreetly stitched onto the lining, and probably said something like Gucci. Or Chanel, if the bouclé jacket she was wearing was the real thing.

Not that it mattered. The important thing was the Alice was no longer beaming, but grim-faced. And Edward looked as if he was about to throw up, his head down, his hand over his mouth and nose.

"And this is Edward," she added, indicating the boy in the desk next to her with a graceful wave. "His throat hurts a little today, so it's best if he doesn't talk."

"Oh, that's too bad," I said, though I didn't believe her. The boy looked as if he was in utter agony, not just as if had a sore throat. I thought of suggesting that he go see the nurse, but reconsidered. He was a senior who could decide for himself.

I returned to calling the roll, which ended with Teague, Eliza (_Hollister_). I went on to collect the summer homework and hand out books – both times, Alice Cullen glided up to the front of the room to drop off her and her brother's summer homework essays, and to collect their copies of "Four Greek Plays" – and start the introduction to "Oedipus Rex," the first work we'd be tackling.

As I conducted the business of the day, I kept surreptitiously glancing at Edward Cullen, without intending to. His head was still bowed, but his hand was now gripping the edge of his desk. Even from my position at the front of the room, I could see the muscles and tendons tensed in the forearm extending from the pushed-up sleeves of his white button-down shirt. Periodically, his sister put her hand on his shoulder – in reassurance? In warning? I couldn't tell.

All the while, the other students seemed unaware of the bizarre tableau being acted out behind them. They never looked at the Cullens, never talked to them or interacted with them in any way. It was as if they were invisible to everyone but me.

I glanced up at the wall clock – the period was about to end. As my eyes flickered down, they met a pair of black ones. Edward Cullen was staring at me now with an undisguised, burning hostility.

Then the bell rang, I blinked, and the next second both Cullens were gone. What the fuck?

* * *

The experience rattled me, and I wasn't as on top of my game as I should have been for the next period, the last class of the day. Unfortunately, that was the class that included Justin Stanley, neighborhood lothario. He sprawled out in his seat, smirking at me, and probably telling his football buddies around him that I had been a total bitch to him. Embarrassment was apparently going to turn into being a pain in my ass. Great.

I forgot to get a volunteer to take the last-period attendance sheet to the main office, so once I locked up my classroom, I headed over to the administration building.

Edward Cullen was there, talking with Shelly Cope. I stood, frozen, just inside the office door, silent witness to their conversation.

" - I could take a class at Peninsula," he was saying, I hadn't heard his voice before, and it was just as gorgeous as the rest of him, low and smooth and persuasive. And definitely not the voice of someone with a sore throat.

Shelly was flustered. "I'm sorry, you can't take a core class at the college," she told him. "You need to stay in AP."

Dammit, he was so uncomfortable in my classroom he was trying to get out of it. What, oh, what was his problem?

Just then, the door opened behind me, and Eliza Teague brushed past me waving an attendance sheet, presumably from a teacher who was more on the ball than I was. Edward Cullen turned around and glared at me balefully before returning his attention to Shelly.

It seemed that his problem was me.

"Never mind then," he said to Shelly, that voice making his words seem poetic instead of abrupt. "I see that it's impossible. Thank you." He spun on his heel, and giving me a wide berth, followed Eliza Teague out of the office.

"Well!" Shelly breathlessly said as I approached the counter. She had to take a deep inhale before she could ask, "Bella, how was your day?"

I couldn't help thinking that her question was more than rote, considering the topic of her exchange with Edward Cullen. She wanted to hear what had happened with the strange, beautiful boy in my class.

But I found that I didn't want to describe Mr. Cullen's unsettling behavior. There was something … private about it that I couldn't share with her. "Fine," I said instead. "You know, if Edward Cullen doesn't want to be in AP, surely he should be able to get out -"

"No," she interrupted me. "Bob Banner won't allow it – Edward and his sister are our only chances at 5's on the AP exam." I wasn't surprised by that; I knew that the top score on the English test was rare. But I was surprised when she went on to say, "If you get even one 3 out of the rest of that class, you'll have done well."

At last, a bright spot in my day: Val Berty had set the achievement bar pretty low.

* * *

I went home and ran hard, sweating profusely in the heavy air and finding a hill that made my legs burn and my mind forget, briefly, the disturbing Cullens. A clearing at the crest of the hill gave me a view to the west of tangling rivers and the hazy possibility of the ocean. I'd have to figure out how to get there one day.

After dinner, I settled down at the kitchen table with the summer essays on "The Prince of Tides," Pat Conroy's superheated story of the troubled Wingo family, a big bestseller 25 years ago. A couple of hours and 50 tedious plot recitations later I had come to several conclusions: Shelly Cope was dead-on in her assessment of the skills of most of the seniors of Forks High; Gracie Alvarez was remarkable, especially considering that she obviously had learned English only a few years ago; Eliza Teague should never have been forced to read a novel whose centerpiece was an excruciatingly violent home invasion.

And I had that disconcerting experience every teacher besides Einstein has at some point in her career: discovering a student who was far smarter than she is. In fact, I had two who were.

The Cullens had ignored Val Berty's directive to type their summer homework, but their handwriting was so beautifully formed that I couldn't bring myself to mark them down for it. And their essays were beautifully formed as well, if scathing. Alice scoffed at Conroy's "turgid, high-flown rhetoric and grandiose designs," while Edward noted that "as bizarre, hyperbolic episodes mount up, a reader may feel that he is being bombarded by whoppers told by an overwrought boy."

"An overwrought boy." Edward Cullen should know all about that. Still, valid points, and I now felt embarrassed that I had devoured the book, the steamroller plot making me overlook the florid prose and even my discomfort over the fact that one of the major characters was a psychiatrist who falls in love with her patient and admits it to him – how unprofessional.

I shoved Edward Cullen's paper back into my homework folder, and called Raquel.

"Bella!" she said cheerfully. "Hold on a sec." She turned away from the mouthpiece, but I could hear her say, "Hey, Ben, it's my girlfriend. Do you mind?" He apparently didn't, and Raquel's door closed with a muffled thud.

"How are you feeling? How was your first day?" she asked.

"Tiring, of course. How about yours?"

"Frustrating! You won't believe this. I was sent to an elementary school in Burien – it's near viva viva Sea-Tac - apparently because with my name I _must _speak Spanish –"

I laughed weakly in acknowledgment. In Tucson, everyone expected Raquel Salcedo, with her looks and name, to speak Spanish. She would greet such assumptions with a look of scorn and a stream of invective in the language she grew up with, a dialect of the Tohono O'odham tribe. It would be left to me, the pale girl with the Anglo name, to explain to the cabby or guy next to us at the bar or head of the Latino Students' Association that _mi amiga no habla español, lo siento._

"-And because the kids are all immigrants from Mexico they _must _speak Spanish too. Except that they all speak something called Purepecha. Which as _you _probably know" - Raquel's voice took on an exaggeratedly pedantic tone – "is an isolate and thus has nothing in common with either Spanish or the languages I _do _speak."

"Thank you, professor. So what did you do?"

"Art is a universal language so we made it work. Give kids paper and glue and glitter and they'll figure something out."

I wished things were that easy with my own students - everything fixed with an application of glitter. Every time I glanced at Alice and Edward, I would be reminded how pointless it was that they were in my class.

"So, tell me about the youth of Forks," Raquel demanded at the other end of the line.

I gave her the T-shirt tally I had collected: Abercrombie, A&F, Pink, Fitch, AEagle, Hollister, Amer. Eagle, Aéropostale, even a Gap.

"Ooh, that guy saw 'The Social Network!' Maybe he wants to be the next Mark Zuckerberg," she suggested. "Which reminds me how annoying it is that you don't have Facebook anymore."

"You know I can't do it, not with my job. Teachers have been fired for their Facebook pages, their Twitter accounts, their Instagrams –"

"—Because they were morons," Raquel interjected.

"Because some moron tagged them in a photo in proximity to a bong. Besides, it's only for a couple of years."

"It's still incredibly inconvenient. You'd better be able to move back here to Seattle next year just so I can communicate with you. Anyway, are any of your seniors college material?"

"I've got two extraordinarily smart students – top-college smart." I let out a big exhalation.

"That's good, so why do you sound unhappy about that?"

"I'm not sure my class will have much to offer them," I hedged.

"Yeah, but they'll ask you good questions, keep you on your toes, you know, make teaching more interesting for you."

If Edward Cullen keeps looking as if he's going to transform into a werewolf, it'll certainly be _interesting_, I thought.

"Maybe," I said, scrubbing my hand across my face. "Sweetie, I gotta go – school starts really early here."

A little while later, I lay on my futon bed, still puzzling over Edward Cullen's reaction to me, feeling lonely and unsettled. I missed Raquel. I missed the promises of Seattle. And more strongly than I had in years, I missed my mom.

* * *

_Chapter title: "Youth," from "Sheila ki Javani," by Sunidhi Chauhan and Vishal Dadlani._

_A/N: Alice and Edward's literary criticism is borrowed from Gail Godwin's review of "Prince of Tides." And yes, I know of a school that uses that novel for summer reading._

_Purepecha is an indigenous language of Mexico, spoken mostly in Michoacán state. It has under 200,000 speakers._

_Thanks for reading and reviewing! _


	3. Ne peux-tu freiner un peu?

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to Smeyer._

_Thanks to Camilla10 and Mr. Price for reading, to robsjenn for her sharp eyes, and to the talented Rochelle Allison for her rec._

_A reminder to my non-American readers: The idea behind AP classes is that you can earn college credits for taking them and doing well on the tests at the end of the year, and thus pay less tuition and even graduate from college more quickly. The College Board rakes in a lot of money for administrating the tests._

* * *

Chapter 3: Ne peux-tu freiner un peu ?

_You will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James_. – Mark Twain, "The Story of the Bad Little Boy."

The next day dawned sunny and cooler, and I rode to work – it was not a bad ride, little traffic and mostly as flat as Tucson – and navigated my bike around a parking lot of beaters and Ford pickups. There had been a Volvo here yesterday, but I didn't see it this time. I did see a lot of people staring at me as I locked my bike to the rusting rack next to the school office.

I couldn't stop thinking of my troublesome student. After a night's sleep, I had decided that Edward Cullen couldn't hate me – he didn't even know me. There must be something I was missing … a diagnosis, an unusual circumstance. So I used my morning prep period to re-examine my file of IEPs, the individualized education plans for students who needed extra help or special accommodations. There weren't many, and they were standard: extra time for tests, mandated counseling sessions.

The search merely confirmed what I remembered, that there was nothing on Edward Cullen, or for that matter, Eliza Teague. I picked up the IEP file and headed to the admin building.

Roxanne Stevens, the school's plump, bespectacled guidance counselor, was alone in her office, so I closed the door, laid the file on her desk and took a seat. We chatted idly for a few minutes about the weather and my bike – word of my means of transit had traveled fast, it appeared – before she asked, "I assume from that file folder that you need to see me about something?"

I nodded. "Okay," I started, "'The Prince of Tides' was the summer reading for the seniors, and it has a scene where three prison escapees attack a family. So one of my students wrote about something that had happened to her, and I wondered – ''

She held her hand up for me to stop, then said, "And this student was …"

"Eliza Teague."

She pursed her lips, not surprised. "What happened is so well-known here, I can actually tell you," she said, pushing her purple glasses further up the bridge of her nose and leaning her elbows on her desk. "It was about seven years ago. It was a huge, huge news story at the time. The Teagues lived north of town, no neighbors around, just Eliza and her older sister, Erin, and their parents. Eliza was coming home from ballet class with her father one Saturday, and they heard screaming. There was an intruder - three intruders, in fact, from the footprints - in the house attacking her sister. Erin was a junior here.

"Her father told Eliza to stay in the car and went in. He was thrown into the living room wall with such force that it crumbled – he was a big, big man - and Eliza got out and looked into a window of the house and was so horrified that she ran and hid in the garage behind the garbage cans until her mother came back from visiting her sister in Sequim. By then Erin and her father had vanished … carried through the back door, the police think. Their bodies were found in the forest, but by then animals had gotten to them."

"My God, that's horrible," I said, suddenly glad I had a neighbor, even if it was Justin Stanley. "Did the police find the killers?"

"No, and the weird thing was that there was a lot of damage to the house, but no blood, and the attackers didn't leave any evidence behind. And Eliza was the only witness, and she was just 10, and obviously traumatized. All she could remember of the one man she saw was that he had 'red eyes like the devil"' – Roxanne Stevens made air quotes with her fingers – "which isn't going to help the police identify anyone. We were all terrified around here for a while, lemme tell you. Nobody was ever arrested, but thankfully there weren't any more attacks."

"Sheesh. Surely Val Berty knows this. Why would he assign that book to Eliza?"

The guidance counselor pursed her lips again. "Is it really so bad?" she asked. "Maybe it's good for her, to think about this trauma and come to grips with it. Isn't that one of the points of fiction, you know, catharsis?"

I knew the conventional wisdom was that people who suffered a terrible event should talk about it, not suppress their feelings, try to find closure or whatever. But I was more inclined to believe the studies I'd read in psych class that showed that not dwelling on something horrible was actually better, that you would get over your trauma more quickly without reliving it.

I sure would have liked to suppress things – I think I would have been good at it. But unfortunately, I had a reminder of my own trauma every day when I was growing up back home in Laconia. And I didn't think I was a better person for it.

"Maybe," I answered absently, thinking I definitely wasn't going to have my AP students read "In Cold Blood," with its own traumatic home invasion (albeit much better written than "The Prince of Tides").

"Anyway, I'll check in with Eliza today," Roxanne said. "Besides, I want to see if I can get her to think about college."

"Thanks." After all the damage was done, the wound was reopened now. Maybe it would be good for Eliza to talk to someone. "Is there anyone else with stories I should know about?" I asked, hoping Roxanne might bring up Edward Cullen without my mentioning him.

She shook her head. "Nothing I can tell you. And it's just the usual: divorces, unemployed parents. Lots of drinking and driving since we're in the middle of nowhere. Ethan Yorkie's one of your students, right? His older brother died the same year Erin Teague did. Minor drugs. Some immigration problems. Nothing you wouldn't find in Arizona."

"Immigration problems, I know plenty about," I agreed, hiding my disappointment as we went on to discuss some details in the IEPs. Maybe Edward Cullen had a phobia or sensory processing disorder that wasn't a recognized disability and that Roxanne didn't know about? Maybe there was some noise or smell in my classroom that disturbed him?

I would just have to ask the boy.

* * *

But I didn't see even the top of Edward Cullen's distinctive hair in the cafeteria, and neither he nor his sister appeared for AP English – they had excused absences, but I couldn't help looking frequently at their empty desks, just far enough away from the windows to be beyond the reach of the sun that was pouring in, as if they might suddenly materialize.

Their absence perhaps was just as well, since much of the class discussion centered not on the role of hubris and fate in Greek drama as exemplified by "Oedipus Rex," but on how someone could have married his own mother.

"Oedipus didn't _know_ that Jocasta was his mother," Gracie Alvarez pointed out.

"Okay, but she would have been a lot older than him, right?" Brett Banner said, disgust on his face.

Gracie shrugged.

"Does anyone know?" I asked the class. More shrugs. I answered my own question. "In ancient Greece, women married very young. Jocasta could have been only 14 years older than Oedipus."

"Gross," Brett said, getting some nods in agreement.

"Hey, it's young for a MILF," Andy Marks (_Amer. Eagle_) said, snorting at his own wit as the other students groaned.

"Mr. Marks," I said coldly.

"Sorry," he mumbled.

I went on as if there had been no interruption. "And those 14-year-old girls were typically married to men more than twice their age," I said.

Silence. Apparently nobody was grossed out by that.

* * *

To repay her for her hospitality, I had invited Angela to my house for dinner. She came after supervising detention, and I immediately handed her a glass of wine.

"Thanks!" she said after taking a gulp. "You wouldn't expect that many kids to get in trouble on the second day of school, but I had plenty."

"In that case, I'll top you off," I said, going to fetch the bottle.

"What great paintings!" she said as I poured more wine. "This one is really lovely," she added, moving to stand in front of Renee's portrait. "Did you do it?"

"No, I don't have that kind of skill. It's by my friend Raquel."

"Who's it of?"

"My mom." I took a swig of my own wine.

"Does she live back in Arizona?"

I looked away from Angela, knowing I was going to make her uncomfortable with my answer. "She's dead," I said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, sounding, to her credit, actually sorry.

"Thanks. It was a long time ago. Can you eat in a few minutes?"

Angela was enough of a pastor's daughter to know to just say yes and not pry.

I served pasta with vegetables, and an apple crumble – if there was anything that the Port Angeles farmers' markets had plenty of right now, it was apples. Angela relaxed as we ate and drank, and while she was not a rumor-monger and seemed to have a natural disinclination to think badly of anyone, she proved to be informative, having lived in Forks for so long.

She knew which of our colleagues were lifers here, and which were passing through. Jeff Mason was a little of both. He had been close to our age now when he was Angela's teacher, aiming to stay in Forks just a few years, but he had fallen in love with a local girl several years younger than himself.

"He must have been her teacher too?" I asked, calculating, and Angela nodded.

"Ashley was in my year, and they got married the summer after she graduated." When I raised my eyebrows at her, she went on. "Sure, there was a little talk about it, but it's pretty common in a small town – the dating pool's shallow, you know? Nobody thinks about it anymore."

"Yeah, but if a female teacher did that, nobody'd forget about it," I said, and told her about my encounter with Justin Stanley.

"Eeek," she said when I had finished. "I guess you better be careful. I went to school with Jessica, but I don't really know him – he moved here while I was away at college. His family broke up, and Jessica's mom took him in, in between buying up all the empty houses in town." She waved her hand around to indicate the house we were in.

I barely paid attention to that because I saw an opportunity. "Ah," I said. "Like the Cullens' family took them in?"

"Maybe." Angela scrunched up her face before taking another bite of the crumble. "I don't know their story, just that Alice and Edward and Emmett are adopted and the other two are foster children, twins. I think they're niece and nephew to Mrs. Cullen? Or something like that. All I know is that Dr. Cullen works at the hospital and that he and his wife are quite young."

"Oh," I said, disappointed in my investigation yet again. "Well, you're right, Alice and Edward are incredibly smart. I haven't had a chance to see how they are in class, though – they weren't here today."

"Yeah, they go off hiking when it's sunny," Angela said as if that was the most ordinary thing in the world, and she snickered at my expression. "Hey, Tucson girl, calm down, it's not sunny that often during the school year. Just wait until you go for an entire month without a ray of sunshine. Besides, they're such good students it's hard to complain that they're not in class for a day."

"Fine, fine. So how are they when they are actually _in_ class?"

She laughed. "Believe me, you and I will never have the Cullens in detention. Always polite. I gotta admit, Alice and Edward sometimes looked a little bored in bio, but when nobody else knows the answer you can count on them to have it."

So what was wrong with me, with my classroom? "Huh," I said aloud. "I guess I'll find out."

* * *

The days continued to be dry and sunny, and my attendance sheets continued to show excused absences for the Cullens. It made me both relieved and oddly depressed. Still, my life fell into a routine: work, run, cook, work, Skype with Raquel, sleep. On Friday, Ethan Yorkie, the boy whose brother had died, came to interview me for the school newspaper, The Spartan Spokesman. If I'd been a student I would have refused, but as a teacher I couldn't say no to him. Fortunately, his questions were neither specific nor probing, and I was able to obfuscate my way out of any big revelations. At the end he asked me what superpower I'd most like to have, and I could answer that one honestly without getting in trouble.

"I'd like the ability to learn any language easily," I told him. Who needed superspeed and strength if you could manage to speak French fluently?

The clouds returned on Monday, and so did Alice Cullen, but not her brother. Another excused absence for him. Alice sat in her desk, wearing what appeared to be the world's softest cardigan, pearl-gray cashmere, and regarded me with her feline golden eyes. Such a strange contrast with her dark hair. I was glad to see that she didn't look bored, even if she had a right to. And as Angela had promised, she volunteered to answer the questions nobody else could.

When the period ended, Alice came up to drop her accumulated homework on my desk. "Ms. Swan," she said in her lovely voice as the classroom emptied behind her.

"Welcome back, Ms. Cullen," I answered, and paused. Alice looked up at me expectantly, and I succumbed to my curiosity. "Your brother is still out?"

"Yes, but he is recovering from what ails him," she said, tilting her head and gazing over my shoulder a second before meeting my eyes again.

"And I think he'll be back tomorrow. In fact," she went on, more cheerfully, "I'm sure of it." She gave me a sudden, dazzling smile, and practically skipped out of my classroom, pale legs whirling under a black pleated skirt.

"Tomorrow" was my birthday, and I greeted the fateful day with a scowl, only mildly cheered by the knowledge that none of my colleagues, even Angela, knew the significance of the date for me. It was drizzling, but lightly, and I told myself I had to show some fortitude and get used to biking on wet roads. I didn't have gas money to burn. My two wheels were drawing fewer stares now, but Bruce Clapp chose this day to hold forth at lunch on the dangers of bicycles.

"The roads in this country were built for cars," he declared, wagging a finger at me. "It's not safe for bikes to be on them."

"In the words of Mayor Bloomberg," I countered, "the roads were built to get people where they want to go."

He grunted around a mouthful of hamburger. "Maybe in New York, maybe in Portland, but not Forks."

As he spoke, there was a flash of auburn in my peripheral vision, and my eyes darted to the other side of the cafeteria, to that table half-obscured by the salad bar, where the Cullens sat. Edward Cullen was here today, or at least his hair was. The Clapp cleared his throat, and I realized he was waiting for a response from me, but I was too distracted now to argue with him.

"Just don't run me over when you see me on the road, Bruce," I said absently, and the other teachers laughed.

* * *

So Edward Cullen was back, but he didn't seem much more comfortable in my classroom than he had a week ago. Alice looked uneasy, her brother stared motionless at his desk the whole period, and their classmates once again ignored them both.

When the bell rang, Edward came up to my desk with his late homework, Alice hovering at his side. He nodded at me, but said nothing as he nudged the papers across my desk and turned to leave.

"Mr. Cullen?" I said, stopping him in his tracks. "May I speak with you a moment?"

He didn't look at me, but at Alice, who considered him a second before saying, "I'll wait for you outside, Edward." He turned toward me slowly, reluctantly, as his sister left, his eyes on the ground.

"Are you all right?" I asked, and from what I could see of his face he seemed puzzled by my question. "You were out for several days," I reminded him.

"I'm fine," he mumbled, and fell silent. He didn't fidget, but just stood like a perfectly proportioned statue that happened to be wearing black jeans, a green button-down and expensive-looking boots.

"Thank you for the homework," I said. "You know, I can talk to Mr. Banner if you want to go to the community college. You shouldn't be forced to stay here if you are uncomfortable."

"That's not necessary," he said, still staring at the floor. Seeing the tension in his jaw, I was sure he was lying.

I forged on. "Is there something else I can do? Do you need a new seat? Is there an odor or -"

"I'm fine."

I sighed in frustration. What did it take to get through to this guy? "AP is a scam anyway," I muttered, more to myself than to him.

He finally looked at me, startled. "You're saying that your class is a scam?" he asked.

"Not my class-" I said, then hesitated, because for him and his sister, it _was_ worthless "-necessarily. But there's no guarantee that you'll end up with credits from the test, since so many colleges don't give any." _Especially not the colleges you're likely to attend._ "For the vast majority of students, AP's just $90 down the drain, or rather in the pockets of the College Board."

"That's an unusual way of looking at it," he said, and for the first time, I saw the hint of a smile on Edward Cullen's face. A lovely, lovely face with those golden catlike eyes -

"Did you get contacts?" I blurted out. "Your eyes are a different color."

He shoved his hand through his hair and shrugged. "I have hazel eyes. They change depending on the light, and what I'm wearing," he said, but I couldn't help squinting at him skeptically. Hazel eyes didn't go black.

Which I was about to say, but then his face hardened, and he spat out, "Don't go to any effort on my account." Without waiting for a response, Edward Cullen turned and vanished out the door.

* * *

Once again I was rattled for the final period, which made me less circumspect than I should have been. As I distributed the thick Everbinds of "The Canterbury Tales," Justin Stanley whined, "We're going to have to read all this?"

"Oh, no, we're not going to read the salacious ones," I assured him.

Next to him, the pretty blond Lindsey Mallory tittered, while Justin Stanley looked at me in bewilderment. Nonetheless, I was sure now he would read the whole book, or at least skim it ... once he'd asked Lindsey what "salacious" meant. He was going to be disappointed because, yes, the bawdiest stories weren't in this high-school-approved edition.

Still, it wasn't professional, and I was berating myself as I hopped on my bike. The morning's drizzle had mutated into a mix of fog and mist that I wasn't sure had a name. As I headed through the teachers' row of cars, I looked left and like a compass finding north, my eyes met those of Edward Cullen across the emptying student lot, standing next to a silver car, holding the passenger door open for his sister. Ah, so he was the driver of that Volvo. A tree-hugger's car in a logging town, what an odd choice –

- and there was honking, and where the hell had that van come from? The van that was about to hit me? I leaned sharply right to get out of the way, but I overbalanced and started skidding on the wet asphalt, heading into and under the wheels of that damn van that was still coming, hurtling toward me from the fast turn it had made into the lot. And then I was being swung around and away, my bike spiraling to the ground, the van veering left and crashing to a stop, its front end intimately nestled into the back end of Bruce Clapp's Chevy Tahoe.

Somehow I was on my feet, all in one piece, and Edward Cullen was holding me up with arms that felt like steel rods. There was roaring in my ears and I felt disconnected from reality, as if I were watching a movie.

"You're in the teachers' parking lot," I said faintly.

"I can't be here," Edward Cullen answered, looking down at me appalled. I was about to explain that no, it wasn't the rules I was talking about, it was the fact that he had been across the lot two seconds ago, and I couldn't understand how he had gotten here.

But he didn't give me a chance, because he looked sickened and dropped his hands from me so quickly I wobbled. I didn't get it. I didn't use perfume or fruity lip gloss or even strawberry-scented shampoo, and yet something about me made him want to vomit.

"I _can't_ be here," he said again, more urgently, eyes boring into mine, breath on my face.

And suddenly he was gone as he always was, my eyes not registering his path, and the roaring in my ears sharpened into running feet and shouts. The driver of the crumpled van – I saw now that it had the name of a food service company on the door; he must have been meaning to make a delivery to the cafeteria but taken a wrong turn - was able to roll down his window.

"Qué coño ha acaba de pasar?" he yelled. _What the fuck just happened? _

One small part of my brain automatically noted that based on his accent and choice of expletive, the driver was probably from northern Mexico. But the much bigger part was trying to figure out how what the fuck that had just had happened _had_ happened, and how to keep Edward Cullen out of it.

"Are you all right?" I asked the driver quietly in Spanish. "Did you hit your head?"

"Where's that guy?" he said instead. "He wasn't there, then I saw him, and now he's gone."

Irritation jerked me from my haze. "Well, you obviously didn't see me, and yet here I am," I snapped at the driver with all the indignation of a cyclist who had been nearly clipped. He started to say something more, but we were now surrounded by students, some of them mine, who had finally managed to maneuver around the lip-locked vehicles.

"Has anyone called an ambulance?" I said to the small crowd that had formed. "This guy needs to be looked at."

"I have," Bruce Clapp said, panting as he jogged up. "Students, go home, you're not needed here," he barked, and they shuffled away to their part of the lot, still close enough to watch what passed for excitement here, if not hear. The driver pushed aside the airbag that had deployed in the impact, climbed out of the van, leaned against it, and pulled out a cellphone. Bruce looked on the verge of asking him a question, but I cut him off, "He speaks Spanish," I said, tilting my head at the driver.

The coach shrugged and stared at his damaged S.U.V. "Now I'm going to have to deal with the stupid insurance company." He sighed.

"I'm sorry your car got hit. That guy drove into here way too fast."

"Are _you_ all right?" Bruce asked.

Yes, I was – flown out of danger by a stone body that appeared out of nowhere. "I'm fine," I told him. In fact, I was being a lot more honest than Edward Cullen had been when he had said the exact same two words to me after class earlier. "I was able to get my bike out of the way. The van didn't touch me."

"Yeah, but look at that - proof that bikes are dangerous," the Clapp said sententiously, pointing at my downed wheels.

"I think what this shows is that vans are dangerous," I retorted, hauling up my bike and putting down the kickstand. I wasn't damaged, and neither was my bike, aside from a scrape along the front fork and mud on the pannier. It was a sturdy, heavy old girl's bike that I'd found used in Tucson, and it wouldn't crumple easily – at least, not as easily as I would have under the van's wheels. I could have died, while at most the van driver would have a minor concussion.

It was Bob Banner's turn to jog onto the scene, looking fretful about a lawsuit. "Why aren't you wearing a helmet?" he scolded me. I didn't bother to explain to him that a helmet wouldn't have saved me in this case because he immediately turned to the driver, who was murmuring into his phone and rubbing his head. "And you," he went on, "What in heaven's name were you doing in the teachers' lot?"

I intervened again. "He's a Spanish-speaker," I said.

Bob Banner huffed in exasperation and ordered Bruce, "Go fetch Barbara to translate."

"Mr. Banner?" a voice I recognized trilled out. "I think Señora Goff has left. But I can help."

We all turned to face Alice Cullen, all bright smile and eagerness. "Of course you can, Ms. Cullen," Bob Banner mumbled, looking dazed. I'd bet that he had a little crush on Alice. That family sure had an effect on school administrators.

Alice was already talking with the driver. I could hear him grumble, "I can speak English fine," but Alice whispered something to him that shut him up. When a police car and ambulance pulled up, I eavesdropped on Alice while Bruce moaned to Bob about the damage to his Tahoe. The driver didn't complain even when Alice's interpretation differed materially from his story … meaning that as far as Forks's finest was concerned, her brother played absolutely no role in the Great Teachers' Parking Lot Collision of 2011. By the end, I'd bet, even the driver was convinced that he had hallucinated my savior.

The driver was loaded onto a stretcher because Alice told the EMT's that he had hit his head – which was true; she didn't lie about that part – and the younger of the two police officers headed toward Bob, Bruce and me in our little huddle. He had a nametag on his blue uniform shirt that said "Crowley."

"Tyler," Bob and Bruce greeted him.

"Coach, Mr. Banner," the officer answered, shaking their hands. He was tall and dark-haired and tan, as if he had exclusive access to some secret sunny beach in Forks.

"Are you okay?" Bob asked, and I realized that Tyler Crowley looked a little green under his remarkable tan.

"This is not my favorite situation, but yeah, I'm okay." He looked at my bike, then me. "You saw the crash, I understand, Ms…?"

"Bella Swan," I responded to his cue, and launched into my own Edward-free story of the accident. As I talked I could see Alice Cullen back at the silver Volvo, sliding into the driver's seat, alone. Where the hell had her brother gone?

* * *

Even with my mind elsewhere, my story seemed to satisfy Officer Crowley, and at the end he offered me a ride, in case I was too shaken up to use my bike. I turned him down, and headed home. It was my day to do sprint intervals, and the focus needed for that kept me from obsessing over my unlikely rescue. For a few minutes, at least.

But when I had stripped off my running gear and started dinner, I discovered that while I had been able to escape birthday comments at work, I wasn't going to be so lucky at home. I got calls and texts from Tucson – even a rendition of "Happy Birthday" from a couple of guy friends who were in a Tex-Mex/indie rock/Calexico-ish band and probably didn't know that I had slept with both of them (I had a weakness for musicians). I immediately suspected that Raquel had instigated this outpouring.

I even had a short, awkward conversation with my father, but I didn't think Raquel was involved in that.

Nor could I escape retelling the story of the accident, since amid all the birthday wishes, Angela called. She hadn't seen the crash, because she was running volleyball practice, but she'd heard about it.

After I had told her the story and assured her I was all right she asked, "Was Tyler there?"

"Tyler Crowley?" I asked, absentmindedly marking spelling tests as we talked. "Yeah, he talked to me."

"He's an old classmate. He and I and another friend have dinner nearly every week together, at the diner. Why don't you join us next time?"

"Sure," I said. I could start my wash at the coin laundry before dinner. "So, your friend seemed a little freaked out being there?"

"Oh, poor Tyler, I'll give him a call," Angela said.

"Yeah, Bob Banner seemed a little worried about him."

"Our junior year, he was in an accident in the parking lot where someone died," she said. Jeez, this place was full of people having to relive their trauma. "Maybe he'll tell you about it at dinner."

My last call of the night was from Raquel. "You know, I really don't need to be reminded that I'm turning 24," I complained to her.

"Oh, come on, I thought getting Gabriel and Aidan to sing to you _together_ was a stroke of genius," Raquel said, snickering.

"Har-har."

"I knew you would be all touchy and bitchy about it, but isn't it better than brooding about your birthday?"

"I guess," I conceded, though what I really thought was that it was better than brooding about what didn't add up in my near-death experience. "So, thanks?"

"That's the spirit!" She paused, then went on more seriously, "You're all alone out there, and I know that this is a tough birthday for you."

"Yeah," I answered. "It was a tough day all around. A food-service van nearly hit my bike today at school."

"Fuck, no! Really?" Raquel exclaimed. "Tell me all about it."

But even with Raquel, my best friend I always told everything, I found I couldn't talk about my mysteriously fast, strong-armed student. It felt like a little tear in our friendship, but I just couldn't do it, and I gave her same story as I had to Angela.

We hung up, and even though I didn't like to drink alone, I poured a glass of red wine and gave myself a toast: "To surviving 24 unscathed," I muttered, and swallowed.

I had made it through today thanks to Edward Cullen, but he wouldn't be able to save me from everything that threatened me.

* * *

_Chapter title: "Can't you slow down?," from "Camions sauvages" by Amadou & Mariam_

_A/N : I always wear a helmet, but there's a lively debate among cyclists about whether it's necessary, or even smart. Bella has her own reasons for not wearing one. Thanks for reviewing! _


	4. Karibu Ya Bintou

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight."_

_Thanks again to Camilla10 and Mr. Price, and all of you who have recced this story, on ADF and elsewhere._

* * *

Chapter 4: Karibu Ya Bintou

"Mr. Cullen?"

It was the day after the parking lot incident, and the end of AP English and another hour of Edward Cullen staring at his desk. I had some of his homework to return, and more important, I had questions.

Alice was hovering again, but this time she rolled her eyes before telling her brother she would be waiting for him in the hallway.

"Ms. Swan."

My eyes jerked up from Edward Cullen's boots, the same he had on yesterday and definitely not made for running, and I stammered, uncertain how exactly to ask my question. "Um, I, wanted to thank you for helping … no, for saving me yesterday …"

He raised an eyebrow, and I flailed on, lowering my voice, "How – how did you get over to me so fast?"

"I didn't."

I looked at him incredulously. Was he trying to be _modest_? Years of competition had given me a good sense of speed and distance; not even an Olympic champion sprinter like Usain Bolt could have made it across the lot to me in time. Yet Edward Cullen had done just that, and without even breathing hard.

"No, that was really, extraordinarily fast," I said. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Right, you haven't, because you didn't see anything." He looked thoughtful now, his voice was low and smooth … the voice he used with Shelly Cope. "You know, my sister saw you afterward. She thought you looked really shaken up. Maybe you just imagined -" What? Was he trying to pretend that nothing had happened?

"No, I didn't," I cut him off, my irritation with his suggestion pushing me to repeat my question. I kept his name out of my account of the crash. I deserved an explanation. "You have to tell me: _how did you get to me so fast?" _

My breath came sharp and short as I stared at him and he stared back, the thoughtful expression transformed first into surprise and then into … contempt.

"I don't have to tell you anything. I just need you to leave me alone," Edward Cullen said. His icy tone was like a slap and I recoiled. "Stop asking questions, stop trying to help. Just leave me alone. Now."

He held my gaze another second before stalking from the room, his steps slow and deliberate, a clear message: _see, I'm not fast at all._

I dropped into my chair and covered my face with my hands, horrified. What I had seen as concern for a gifted student was, from his perspective, harassment. With his looks, no doubt he had been the subject of an onslaught of attention from his peers and even adults; with his condition - dammit, what was it? - he would have found it all uncomfortable.

And my God, he was right. I needed to leave him alone, because I had been deluding myself: I was becoming obsessed. I could try to argue that I was simply trying to figure out how he had snatched me away from death or dismemberment, and why he and Alice felt the need to conceal the fact that he had. But the truth was that I was entirely too interested in my too-smart, too-handsome student.

Maybe it was my punishment for snickering at Shelly Cope and Bob Banner for their crushes on the Cullens. And I was being so obvious that Alice was rolling her eyes at my little fixation too.

If I didn't get control of myself, this could end very badly.

The next day, I placed Edward Cullen's graded homework on his desk before he arrived so he could have one fewer encounter with me. And in the days following – or at least the non-sunny ones - I avoided walking by his seat. I didn't call on him, and he never volunteered a comment or answer. Which mean that he got no participation points, but his marks were so good otherwise that he would earn an A without them.

What I couldn't stop doing was looking at him. He almost never looked at me - he must have memorized the faux wood grain on his desk, he stared at it so much – but when he did, he mostly seemed frustrated and puzzled. Alice sat next to him, her expression sometimes glum, sometimes annoyed, sometimes even … apologetic?

Or maybe it was that she was pitying me for being pathetic. I couldn't exactly ask her. Instead I interrogated myself. I had been truthful when I told Angela that I hadn't liked teenage boys even when I was a teenager. To me, even the nicest guys were trouble, potential traps ready to ensnare me and prevent me from getting out of Laconia. And when I thought of the students here … yeah, no, yuck. Teenage boys hadn't improved as a species since I'd left high school.

So what was it about Edward Cullen that was so alluring?

Stop right there, Swan. Whatever it was, I couldn't afford to find out.

If I continued down this path, I would be finding ways to justify myself – somehow we had a special connection, he was mature for his age, etc., etc. It was the same sort of rationalizations used by Mary Kay Letourneau with her sixth-grade student, even perhaps by that remedial math teacher in New York with the 17-year-old underwear model.

It was wrong even to speculate about it. Instead, I needed to think about men who wouldn't violate the morality clause in my contract.

Like Angela's friends. She reintroduced me to Tyler and introduced me to a guy named Mike Newton, and I found them both to be sweet, funny and even admirable. I enjoyed having dinner with them all at the Forks Diner, where I discovered that the soups were made from scratch and that the pies and cobblers were filled with Olympic Peninsula berries preserved by the owner.

Tyler had indeed told the story of his own parking lot collision as he hung out with me at the Forks Laundr-O-Matic after dinner. I had agreed to look at a paper he was writing for his English lit class at Peninsula in exchange for his helping me fold.

Nearly seven years ago, he had been the driver of a van that crushed Ethan Yorkie's brother, thanks to bald tires and a patch of ice on a January morning.

"I was so glad there wasn't a body between the food-service van and Coach's Tahoe the other day," he said quietly as we folded towels under the fluorescent lights of the coin laundry. "Eric got caught between my van and a pickup. He didn't stand a chance. All I got was a cut on my head, and Eric died."

More proof that vans were dangerous, but I didn't say that. "I'm sorry you had to go through that," I said instead. I gave him one end of a flat sheet to hold.

"Thanks, though of course it was far worse for Eric's family," Tyler said, stepping back and folding his end in half. "Anyway, that sort of pushed me to join the department. I watched the guys working the scene, and I was so relieved they were there. It's a cliché, I guess, but I could see becoming a policeman was a way I could kinda make up for what had happened. What I had done." He stepped to me with the sheet and I finished folding it and put it in my basket.

"That's really responsible of you, especially considering that it was an accident and all," I said. Charlie had joined the Laconia force chiefly as a way of supporting his wife and the baby born six months after their wedding. Which _sounds _responsible. Which Charlie wasn't.

Tyler shrugged. "It gave me a purpose," he said, then grinned, his mood lightening as he surveyed my remaining laundry. "Do you need me to fold your underwear now?"

"Perv," I said, rolling my eyes at him. "I'll take care of my unmentionables while you get me a pen and your essay. A red pen, preferably. I'm going to go to town on your comma splices."

"What's that?"

"After I'm done with you, you'll know all about them."

I had a similar conversation with Mike Newton a couple of days after our dinner. I went into the sports equipment store he ran with his mother, having reluctantly concluded after a few muddy runs that I needed to shell out for some waterproof running shoes.

"I quit college after a couple of years, but I was living in Seattle, had a good job at REI headquarters –" Mike said as we talked amid open boxes of Brookses and Salomons and Merrells that I was trying out.

"—You were really branching out there, Mike," I said, smirking, as I laced up another pair of trail shoes with gaiters.

"Hey, it's good to see how a really big sporting goods company operates," he said, offended. I guessed his sense of humor didn't extend to himself.

"I know, I was just teasing," I assured him, and he looked mollified.

"Anyway, my dad had a heart attack, and then an infection from the surgery and didn't, you know, recover ..."

"Sorry," I said softly. I meant it, and he nodded.

"So I came back because my mom was depressed and couldn't deal with this place on her own," he said, jerking his head toward the front of the store where the brittle, blond Karen Newton was meeting with her rafting guides to discuss how dam removal on the Elwha River would affect tours.

"It ruined the relationship I was in back in Seattle," he went on. "My girlfriend didn't want me to move back here. But if this place went out of business, or was sold to an outsider, that could have a big effect on Forks. We're one of the biggest employers in the county, what with the retail shop and the expeditions and the rentals. And I couldn't leave my mom feeling overwhelmed."

Damn, another responsible, admirable guy, I thought, as I took another pair of shoes for a test run around the racks of kayaks in the Newton Outfitters parking lot.

I liked both Mike and Tyler. They were decent and reliable and steady (sure, Tyler could be a little skeevy). But unlike in Tucson, unlike on a big college campus, a fling here would have strings attached that would be difficult to snip. The guys, I suspected, would be clingy, and it'd be hard to keep them in the friends-with-benefits zone.

And they were a little … dull. Their hair was too tame and their voices were a little squeaky and their eyes didn't change color and they wouldn't be able to keep up with me on the trail.

And I was a fucking idiot.

Fine. I'd have to get laid somewhere else. That's what Angela did - she was dating a law student in Seattle and I was pretty sure they didn't spend all their time discussing torts. I'd asked her for a recommendation for a gynecologist who took the union insurance, and she'd told me that she still went to the Planned Parenthood in Port Angeles, since it gave out a year of birth control pills at a time.

"Oh, I don't have to worry about birth control," I said, reaching into the refrigerator in the staff lounge to retrieve my lunch, making sure to avert my gaze from the yellowing newspaper clip on the wall above me about the misbehaving teacher.

Angela narrowed her eyes at me as I straightened up. "Condoms aren't always reliable," she said, reverting to her teacher persona. At least she paid me the compliment of assuming that I'd use _something_.

"Yes, ma'am. That's why I had a tubal ligation."

Her scolding expression turned to one of shock. "Wow, you're really serious about not having children," she said.

"Yep. And when Rick Santorum becomes president and outlaws birth control, I won't have to stockpile black-market packets of Yasmin and Trojans."

"You have a point," Angela said. She dropped her voice as we stepped into the hallway, in hearing range of students. "But getting your tubes tied…"

I shrugged."You can't argue with its effectiveness."

She pushed open the door of the admin building for me. "Would you adopt?" she asked.

I'd been asked this question before, and I'd learned to answer it so it didn't sound like I hated children. Which I didn't. I just hated them _for me_.

"If the circumstances were right, I could see it," I said.

It was just that the circumstances never would be right.

It seemed to be enough for Angela. "Well, my mom goes to an old guy, Dr. Snow, who's on our insurance plan," she said, "and you won't care if he doesn't keep up with the latest contraceptive methods."

"An old guy is perfect for me," I said. In fact, it was an old guy who did my tubal ligation, finally, after all the young female gynecologists I visited in Tucson refused … in favor of lecturing me about how it was too early for me to know I didn't want to be a mother, even after I had told them my history.

I did know, thank you very much for your condescension.

So I found a gynecologist. And then I found a Saturday yoga class I liked in Port Angeles. The teacher, Lakshmi, was a woman my age with a soothing voice and enviably flexible shoulders.

"You are really strong, but less flexible," she observed when I introduced myself to her after class.

"I hope that doesn't say something about my life," I said, joking, but she looked contemplative.

"Sometimes it does. You need to have a balance of strength and flexibility."

"Yeah, well, I run," I said, and she nodded, because runners have notoriously tight hamstrings. "My coach at school thought that yoga would help me keep from tripping on the trail. So is Lakshmi your birth name or your nom de yoga?" She had blue eyes and flaxen hair, but maybe she had New Age-y parents who named their kids after Hindu goddesses.

"My teacher gave it to me. I needed to free myself of the baggage of my old name."

"Lakshmi's a cool name," I said, because it suited her, Lakshmi being the goddess of beauty. "And better than being named after a destructive goddess like Kali, I suppose."

"You mean, with all the death and blood drinking? Yeah. Especially since I'm a vegetarian."

That occasioned a conversation about farmers' markets and food co-ops and Lakshmi's supplier of raw milk. As we left the studio, talking, she snagged from a hook a tote bag emblazoned with "Namaste, bitches!" Hmm, maybe Kali would have been a more appropriate name for her.

* * *

"Bella, are you working the homecoming dance on Saturday?" Barbara Goff asked at lunch. The cafeteria was festooned with homemade "Go, Spartans!" banners.

"Um, no. I signed up for the Holiday Hop and the girls' choice dance, neither of which I can believe that I'm saying with a straight face," I answered her without looking up from the SAT guide I was skimming. I was doing a series of (alas, unpaid) after-school prep sessions for my students who were taking the SAT in November. One reason I had volunteered to do it was that I knew the Cullens wouldn't be there – they'd already gotten their perfect scores in the spring – and I could use the time to go over things they'd be bored to tears by, like the SAT-approved past tenses of "sneak" and "lie."

The silence that followed was loaded, and I finally raised my head from the multiple-choice questions to see Bruce Clapp fixing me with a stare. "But you're coming to the game, right?" he asked, the question inflected like a statement.

Angela nudged me, but I already knew the right answer. "Of course," I said unenthusiastically. I hated the slow pace, and the brain damage, and the way football hogged athletic department budgets. But I knew that in Forks, as in Laconia, homecoming was one of the most important events of the year. It looked bad for a teacher to skip it.

"Good," the Clapp said. "Not coming to homecoming is a firing offense."

Oh, there were much worse firing offenses, I thought, my eyes flickering to the Cullen side of the cafeteria.

Still, on Saturday afternoon, I found myself sitting in the bleachers of the Forks High football field with Angela, Mike and Tyler. I was wearing a waterproof hat.

"You know, back home, we would have cancelled on the account of rain," I muttered to Angela, who looked up and smirked before retuning to her texting with her law-student boyfriend.

"Cause you guys are wimps in Arizona," Tyler said.

"At least we're dry wimps," I said, tilting my head so water ran off my hat, and looking around once more, in vain and despite myself, for the Cullen siblings. Apparently their avoidance of sports extended to even watching football.

But everyone else in town seemed to be there, crowding the bleachers: my students, of course; my colleagues, including Jeff Mason and his former child bride and their 5-year-old twins; my landlady, Sharon Stanley, sitting next to her daughter, Jessica; Charlotte Gerandy, whom I worked with at the food pantry at church.

And I saw someone else I knew. "Lakshmi!" I called. My yoga teacher was walking along the field and I waved at her. Tyler and Mike were snickering as she started climbing the stands toward us, for some reason. I would have thought they'd be excited about meeting an attractive, accomplished (and flexible!) woman who lived in their area.

I smiled at Lakshmi as she neared us, carrying her "Namaste, bitches!" bag. "Guys, this is –"

"Lauren," Tyler and Mike said together.

"Hey, Mike, hey Tyler," Lakshmi/Lauren said serenely, before giving me and Angela hugs. She floated down onto the bleacher in front of us and twisted around.

"I take Lakshmi's yoga class in Port Angeles," I told Angela. "You should come with me sometime. But," I directed my words to Lakshmi now, "I didn't realize you were from Forks."

"I don't like to dwell on the past," she said. "But my sister Lindsey is in the homecoming court this year, so I had to come see her."

"Oh, I know Lindsey. She's in my English class."

"And she's in my biology class. She's a smart girl," Angela said, before adding bluntly, "so why in the world is she going out with Justin Stanley?" Justin was doing badly enough in Bio II that Angela was getting pressure from the Clapp about it.

The former Lauren Mallory shrugged. "Beats me. But then, I dated the quarterback when I was in high school too," she said, looking pointedly at Tyler. Huh, maybe that explained why Tyler had such difficulty understanding the whole comma splice concept – too many concussions from being sacked.

"Oh, man, look at those guys," Mike said, staring across the field.

I followed his gaze. The Quileute reservation school's football team didn't have many players, but they made up for quantity with quality. Hulking guys with glossy black hair and bulging bare arms and thighs on the verge of bursting out of their football pants. Bruce Clapp marched to the other side of the field, and gesticulated.

"Are those guys always so big?" I asked Angela.

"No," she said in wonder. "I mean, you pick an opponent for homecoming that you can usually beat, right?"

"Coach must be asking if those guys really are in high school," Tyler said. The Clapp was poking at a clipboard now, and the opposing coach was pointing at various players.

After a long discussion involving the coaches, Bob Banner, someone from the district office and the referee, the game finally started. And the Forks players got mauled. The Wolves were amazingly agile and quick, and by halftime were leading us by 35 points. Justin Stanley looked so downtrodden that I almost felt sorry for him.

As the homecoming court was about to be announced, Justin's cousin the super-successful real-estate agent came up to our row and squealed, "Lauren!" Lakshmi squealed back, and Mike cursed next to me.

"Jessica Stanley. My ruined relationship in Seattle," he answered my mute question.

Angela and Tyler each got new squeals, Mike got a curt nod and I got a wave and a suspicious look at my shoulder alongside Mike's arm. That arm suddenly went around my back and squeezed.

"Jessica, this is –" Mike started, but she cut him off.

"I know Isabella. I showed her the rental house across from my mom." Jessica gave me a thin smile. "How's the place working out for you?"

"The trails are great," I said. I decided that Mike's arm was merely friendly, and if it annoyed Jessica, I didn't care.

"Good."

There was silence for a moment. "So!" Mike finally said. "Anybody want anything from the concession stand?"

He looked at me but I shook my head. The others were more enthusiastic, and he and Tyler left to procure food and drink.

Jessica and Lakshmi gossiped conspiratorially in front of me about people I didn't know, but it was fascinating to hear how they talked with each other. Lakshmi lost her soothing yogini voice, Jessica her real-estate agent gloss, and they chattered like the teenage classmates they once were, like the girls in my own classes, all rising inflections and Britney Spears vocal fry and the strong "s" of the Pacific Northwest.

"And, I mean? Connor and her broke up and got baaaack together _five _or _six_ timessss?" Jessica was confiding when Lakshmi leapt to her feet.

"_Ooooh_, Lindsey! Go, girl!" Lakshmi yelled in a very un-meditative way as her sister was crowned junior queen.

The second half of the game was a repeat of the first, and the Spartans stumbled off the field in shock at the score. It was going to be a fun homecoming dance tonight. What a _shame_ I was missing it.

* * *

The next Wednesday proved to be no fun for me. In fact , it proved to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I woke up to find that I'd gotten my period, and my second-favorite method for dealing with the cramps wasn't an option, since I had test prep and dinner with Angela and the guys afterward and thus no time for a run.

My favorite method wasn't an option either, because ever since I acknowledged my moral failings to myself the image of a certain student kept invading my mind and interfering with my efforts to get myself off. I'd never been a, um, visual thinker in this regard, so perhaps "image" wasn't the right word – it was the memory of arms around me for a second, breath on my face, a persuasive voice in my ear.

But whatever it was, it was wrong.

When I arrived at my classroom, there was a stack of thin newspapers outside. I picked it up after I unlocked the door.

Shit, shit, shit. I stared at the article just below The Spartan Spokesman nameplate. "Introducing Isabella Swan" was the headline, and the story itself was equally innocuous, but the photograph with it … fuck me sideways. Ethan Yorkie hadn't gotten that much information out of me, not even the name of my hometown, but he had been enterprising enough to hit the Internet and find the University of Arizona athletic department media guide. So there I was posing in my red and blue Wildcats bra top and running brief, legs and midriff on display.

"Nice picture," said Lars Stevens in first period, with a smirk.

"Nice picture," said Jason Ford in second period. With a smirk.

"Nice picture," chorused Danny Garrett and Billy Warner in third period. With a you-know-what.

"Thanks," I muttered to them all. I had no choice.

"Nice picture," the Clapp boomed as I flung myself into the chair next to Jeff Mason at lunch. "You and I are gonna talk about a cross-country team."

"Cut it out," I growled, because I had a little more choice with him, and turned to Jeff, the teacher who was supposed to be signing off on the contents of The Spokesman. When I was the newspaper editor at my high school, I had been all for a free student press, but right now I could see the virtues of a little more censorship. "Why did you allow that photo in the paper?" I demanded.

He finished chewing his bite of turkey sandwich before answering. "What's wrong with it?" he asked.

"What's wrong with it," I said flatly as Jeff looked around at the women at the table, all regarding him with narrowed eyes.

"Well, yeah –"

"You of all people should know that answer to that," Barbara Goff said, "Mr. I-Married-a-Student."

"Hey, that's not fair –"

"Okay, how about this," Natalie Marshall said, waving around a fork with a piece of lettuce speared on it. "You were on the swim team in college. How would you have felt if you saw a picture of yourself in your Speedo in the paper just after you'd arrived?"

"That's different –"

"Because Bella's a woman, and so it's okay to look at her as an object?" Barbara said, going old-school. Jeff made a dismissive motion at that, but I gave her a thumbs-up.

"If I had put a picture of you in a Speedo in The Spokesman, 95 percent of the girls in my class would have had a crush on you, instead of just half," Angela observed.

"Not 100 percent?" he asked, clueless.

Angela gave him a dirty look. "_I_ never would have had a crush on you, Speedo or no Speedo," she said tartly. "The point is, Bella's going to have to deal with something like that."

"Okay, okay!" Jeff finally said, lifting his hands in surrender. "I'll know better next time!"

"The harm is done now," I grumbled.

Indeed it was. In sixth period, I could have sworn that Edward Cullen was glaring at me as if I had deliberately put that photo of me on the front page of the newspaper just to harass him_.__ It's not all about you, buddy_, I wanted to tell him. But sometimes I wondered if it actually was.

* * *

"Hey, you didn't tell me that your dad was a cop," Tyler said when I met him, Angela and Mike at the diner after test prep.

"My God, the school paper gets around that much?" I asked, appalled.

Tyler smirked and said, "Nice picture, by the way."

I finally got to say the words I'd been longing to say all day. "Fuck you," I said vehemently, and Tyler and Mike collapsed into laughter.

When I got home at last, I called Raquel, ready to rant about my cramps, the photograph and the lack of blackberry cobbler at the diner that night – everything except my shameful secret obsession.

She listened and made the sympathetic noises that women make, then asked, "Are you getting caught up on your work? You've got your lesson plans and stuff?"

"It never ends, but yeah, I've got more of a handle on it now. Why?"

"You sound so down. And I have the perfect antidote for you. You're going to come and spend a weekend with me –" I started to demur, but she steamrollered on "- because I'm in a show, and you can be my date for the vernissage." She put on a goofily exaggerated accent for the pretentious word for opening, and I smiled, happy for her but unsurprised. She had made friends with a group of recent Udub art grads who shared connections and studios, so I figured that sooner or later an opportunity like this would come up for her.

"That's great, a show! Will there be wine at this vernissage?" I asked.

"Wine and cute arty guys. A couple of them play in bands, too," she said, wheedling, knowing my weakness.

"Then I'm in," I said, looking forward to it. Maybe Seattle and some arty musicians was just what I needed. "Should I bring your project paintings back?"

"Nah. It's a group show, so there's limited space, and the girl who's being the curator has already made her picks from what I have here. Just bring yourself, and you know, that sexy Civic of yours because there's a race I have an eye on, and we'll need it to get there."

"Where?"

"A park outside Seattle called Cougar Mountain."

_Cougar Mountain_. How fitting, I thought sourly.

Still, once we talked logistics and made plans, I got off the phone feeling more cheerful than I had in weeks.

* * *

I'd avoided the homecoming dance, but on parent-teacher conference night I had a full dance card. I barely had time to keep the coffee pot full on the snacks table in Building 3 (a job I got thanks to my lack of seniority) between parents.

Still, it was good to get some insight into my students. Gracie Alvarez's mother brought me a tray of tamales, and became more animated when she realized she could speak Spanish to me. Mrs. Alvarez supported her family by cutting salal branches in the forest and selling them to florists – a couple of times on my runs, I had seen groups of harvesters with their loads of greenery – and Gracie was responsible for taking care of her five younger siblings and a flock of chickens.

I encouraged Mrs. Alvarez to think about college for her gifted daughter, who would be a catch for a school with a healthy endowment and a need for diversity, but she seemed doubtful. I started to push harder, but then realized what Mrs. Alvarez wasn't telling me explicitly: she didn't have papers, and Gracie might not either. I made a note to ask the guidance counselor what could be done.

And I learned about people other than the kids in my classes.

Linda Mallory, for instance, ended up talking as much about Lakshmi my teacher as about Lindsey my student.

"Lauren wanted to become a model, so she wasn't interested in college," Linda Mallory said. "Then she got this bizarre haircut and dye job, and she ended up losing her money to some con artist, and everyone laughed about it. And then she got into some sort of yoga nonsense –"

"I know," I told her. "I take her class. It's very good."

"Is it?" her mother said dubiously. "I just don't see how it's a job."

Yes, I could see why Lakshmi didn't want to hang out in Forks.

Sharon Stanley popped her head in while I was with Eliza Teague's mom to say breezily, "Hi, Isabella, I know you'll take care of Justin!"

"Wait!" I called after her, but she was gone. That was unfortunate, because Justin wasn't exactly shining in class. Like Angela, I was getting some pressure from the Clapp about his quarterback's grades. I shook my head and turned my attention back to Mrs. Teague, who had come after her shift at the casino in Port Angeles. As her daughter did sometimes, she looked exhausted. And haunted.

It was my last meeting of the night that lingered in my mind, though. A couple - a blond man, an equally gorgeous brunette woman, decades younger than my other parents – appeared at the door as I was finishing up with Mrs. Teague. Alice and Edward's adoptive parents, I realized … adoptive and yet such a resemblance, even the same hazel eyes.

Mrs. Teague gasped a bit at the sight of them, and skirted them warily as she left my classroom, as if proximity to so much beauty would burn her. As for me, I was old enough to be comfortable with how I looked - I had good skin and hair, and my legs could pedal me up a hill and carry me over a log in the trail – but seeing Dr. and Mrs. Cullen made me feel like an awkward teenager again. Then they both smiled at me and I forgot my discomfort.

"Carlisle Cullen," the blond man said, putting his coffee on a desk and shaking my hand. His grip was warm and pleasantly firm.

"And I'm Esme," the woman next to him said, handing her cup to her husband and taking my hand in turn.

"Bella Swan, how do you do?" I said automatically, waving toward a cluster of chairs. "Come have a seat."

"Alice has said so much about you. She really likes —" Dr. Cullen said as we sat down, me with my sheaf of Alice and Edward papers, but I mindlessly interrupted him.

"You're English," I said, surprised. This gossipy town hadn't mentioned that.

"Indeed, but most people don't notice," he said. _Probably because they're too busy gawking at your pretty face,_ I thought. "What gave me away?"

"The way you say your name. Rounded vowels, and you're nonrhotic. I mean –"

"I don't say my R's? That is a very English thing to do," he agreed. "So who are you, Professor Higgins?"

I flicked through my papers in a nervous gesture. "You mean, can I tell that you grew up in Knightsbridge with a Welsh nanny? No, not at all. I've studied only American accents, and only a little."

"Oh, can you hear mine?" Esme asked.

I grimaced at being put on the spot. "Maybe," I said hesitantly, "if you talk more."

"What should I say?"

"Um, just talk about your day yesterday. You know, what you had for breakfast and dinner, say."

She looked taken aback, and I wondered if my question was somehow inappropriate. Maybe she had an eating disorder?

But no, Carlisle prompted her, "Pancakes?" and she laughed a little.

"That's right, thank you," she said. "We had pancakes before school, with maple syrup. And bacon. Then Carlisle came home from his shift at the hospital –" she looked at him slyly "—and we had a nap. We didn't have lunch, but we did have dinner after the children came home, some venison and some –"

"Wait, there's a butcher around here who sells venison?" I asked, rudely interrupting again. Venison! Hormone-free, and local.

"Ah, no," Carlisle answered. "We hunt it ourselves."

"Oh," I said, disappointed, and trying to picture this elegantly dressed couple out in the forest with rifles and reflective orange vests. I failed.

"So, what do you think?" Esme said. "About my accent."

"Um, someplace in the Midwest, but outside the Northern cities vowel shift." Esme stared at me blankly, and I remembered that, well, no, not many people knew about the changes in the short "a" in the Inland North dialect region.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to go all linguistics geek on you –" I started, but Esme stopped me. "No, it's just that your guess is very good. I'm from Columbus, which is outside the vowel shift's range. And besides, it's been a while since I lived in Ohio. We tend to move around."

"Perhaps you know that all our children were adopted, and they're from different parts of the States. What would be your guess for Alice?" Carlisle asked, before lifting his coffee cup to his lips. I noticed him wincing.

"Oh, don't feel obliged to drink that," I told him. "The coffeemaker has been acting up tonight. So, Alice. She's really interesting – sometimes she makes me think of this old recording of Eudora Welty we listened to in class, the way she softens her Rs. Did she spend some time in the Deep South? She doesn't really have much of a Southern accent …"

"She was born in St. Louis, but I believe she lived in Jackson at some point," Carlisle said, nodding, his cup back on the desk. "What about Edward?"

Like the boy himself, I found myself staring down at my desk, blood rising in my cheeks. Had he complained about me to them? They gave no evidence of being upset, so perhaps he hadn't. At least I could ask _them _what I wanted to know without being accused of harassment. I took a breath and looked at his parents.

"Um, I couldn't tell you; he doesn't talk enough for me to hear anything," I said, though that wasn't quite true – it was more that our few conversations had been too fraught for me to notice his accent. "And that brings me to a question. Is there something about him I should know? He seems uncomfortable in class. Has he mentioned anything that would make being here easier for him? A different desk? Is there a noise that bothers him, or a smell? Am I doing something that disturbs him?" Jeez, I was starting to babble in my eagerness.

Esme and Carlisle exchanged a glance. "I don't believe you're doing anything wrong," Carlisle said. "Of course, seniors often are under a lot of stress, thinking about college…"

"Where _are_ he and Alice thinking of going to college?" I asked.

"Alice will go to the University of Washington," Carlisle said casually.

I looked at him and Esme in consternation. "Why?"

"It's close by, and our other children are there," he said.

"But she could go anywhere, based on what I see. She just handed in this amazing essay quoting Lévi-Strauss and Lacan," I said, thrusting the paper at them, my voice sharper than was wise. I was becoming angry on Alice's behalf. Maybe she was totally bullshitting me, but a student who knew enough to namedrop a couple of French literary theorists belonged at Stanford or Yale or Oxford, and they were forcing her to stay at home.

The Cullens shared another look. "I think we can all agree on Alice's brilliance," Esme said. "But she _wants_ to be close to us. When you've lost your parents, been in foster care, that can be important to you."

"I guess," I said reluctantly, trying to push down the anger splashing like acid in my throat. Renee's death hadn't made me want to be close to Charlie, but he had made sure that I had no other choice.

I didn't get a chance to ask about Edward, because the bell rang, signaling the end to parent-teacher conference night. The Cullens rose in response and over their shoulder I saw Angela. She was gaping as Esme and Carlisle said their goodbyes and nodded politely to her.

"The Cullens never come to these things," Angela said after they left. "You should feel honored."

"Really?" I was surprised, since it was my experience that parents of good students always attended conferences. "You mean they didn't go see Jerry?" Jerry Richardson taught the physics class that Alice and Edward would be taking as seniors.

"I don't think they did. And you got a chance to ogle Dr. Carlisle. He's astonishingly good-looking."

"And married," I reminded her.

She shrugged. "Sure, but he's our age, or close enough. You don't have to feel creepy about finding him astonishingly good-looking."

"Ange, do you have the same crush that Shelley Cope has on the Cullen boys?" I made my voice teasing, but the thought made something twist in my chest.

She grinned, a little sheepish. "Nah, but actually, you've never met Alice's boyfriend, Jasper, right? Tall, blond, hot in a kinda scary way. He always reminded me of a tiger in a cage. Fun to look at if you're not worried about being chomped on."

She was joking, but my own crush, I worried, was all too serious.

* * *

Chapter title: "Welcome to life in limbo" from "Karibu Ya Bintou" by Baloji.

_A/N: Yeah, Bella dabbles in linguistics. If you want to read a Bella who's an accomplished linguist, callmepagliacci's "Bullet From Chekhov's Gun" has just that, and a British Spyward. It's on my favorites list._

_Vocal fry is the sort of guttural sound Britney Spears makes in her first hit song. The Northern cities vowel shift is also a real thing. I have links about both on my profile page._

_As for tubal ligations, the reaction Bella gets to seeking one seems to be surprisingly common, at least based on anecdotes I've heard from young, white women - even though it's the second-most common birth control method in the U.S. Myself, I'm Team Diaphragm: cheap, safe, effective. Almost nobody uses it anymore, though._

_And as always, thanks for reviewing!_


	5. Realno i vŭlshebno

_Thanks to Dolly Reader, "There's a Word for It" is up for fic ot the week at The Lemonade Stand: tehlemonadestand dot net. Also, lots of other interesting fics are up for consideration, so check it out._

_It was great to hear all your reactions to Bella's choice of birth control last chapter. While I hope that you will find that her reasons are interesting and plot-productive, I'd like to say here that any answer to "Why don't you want children?" – including "It's none of your business" – is a good one._

_It was also a kick to hear from other members of Team Diaphragm! There are more of us that I expected._

_BTW, there really is a trail-racing series at Cougar Mountain near Seattle._

_Recap: Last time, Edward told his teacher to leave him alone, and Bella came to the realization that she had a crush on her student. Sadly, Mike Newton and Tyler Crowley, nice as they were, proved to be no substitute. Raquel invited Bella to Seattle for the weekend, and Esme and Carlisle Cullen showed up for parent-teacher night, much to Angela's surprise. _

_Thanks again to Camilla10 and Mr. Price. And to reve2 for a great Lingala song._

_n.b.: Spoiler alert for "The Count of Monte Cristo." (And if you read the English-language version you missed all the dirty parts.) _

* * *

Chapter 5: Realno i vŭlshebno

The guy standing at the classroom door after my AP English class had straight black hair, dark eyes, skin to rival Tyler Crowley's tan, and a smile to make a girl melt.

"Jacob Black?" I said, beckoning him in. The 11th graders were doing the folklore unit – the Brothers Grimm, the tale-type classification system, etc. – and this was the day for the representative from the Quileute tribal center to make a presentation.

"Isabella Swan?" he asked, his smile broadening. What a cutie.

"Bella, yes. Thanks so much for doing this for us," I said, shaking his callused hand when he reached my desk. His navy tie was crumpled and his white dress shirt still had the wrinkles from being folded in its packaging. "You were just in Jeff Mason's class, right? How did it go?"

"Good, I think. This is the first time I've done this, so I was a little –-"Jacob wrinkled his nose. "What is that smell?" he said, suddenly looking queasy.

How familiar, I thought. Though unlike Edward Cullen, this guy didn't look as if he was about to become a werewolf.

"I don't smell anything. What's it like?" I asked eagerly. Maybe Jacob Black too had a supersensitive sense of smell, or whatever Edward Cullen had.

"Something too sweet? Or rotten? Or both?" He waved his hand in front of his face as if to dispel the odor, and I went to crank open a window, letting in a rush of damp air scented with wood smoke.

"I hope it's not _me_," I said, striving to hide how serious my question was.

"No," he said distractedly. "It's not you." He wandered into the back of the room and looked up at the ceiling. "Maybe there's a dead mouse in one of the panels up there?"

I was surprised, because the janitors here really did do a good job. It seemed unlikely they would have missed a decaying rodent, or for that matter, that I would have. But it was a promising idea, especially since the panels he was scrutinizing were right above the Cullens' desks. "I'll have the maintenance people take a look, thanks," I said.

Students were coming in now, and Jacob and I returned to the front of the room. The girls - especially Lindsey Mallory, junior homecoming queen - were whispering and eyeing our visitor appreciatively. Justin Stanley looked mulish as Lindsey giggled with Shelby Wells.

I introduced Jacob, reminded my students to look for differences and similarities with the other folk tales we had studied, then moved to the back of the room so I could keep an eye on Mr. Stanley, my least favorite student.

"Long ago when people were animals and animals were people…" Jacob started. Like many of their neighbors, the Quileute had a story cycle centering on a trickster/creator/transformer character. Kwa'iti changes himself into a salmon and captures a girl to marry. He gives women bees that sting them. As he is being chased by enraged wolves, he drops pinecones that become promontories along the coast that the wolves have to climb.

There were other stories too. A woman falls in love with a dog and gives birth to puppies that can transform into humans by shedding their pelts. The Quileute are scattered and form other tribes when a great flood covers the mountains and carries their canoes to other parts of the Olympic Peninsula (the students took notes furiously on this, since the parallels with the biblical, Hindu and Inca stories were so obvious). Forks has no trees because Whale and Thunderbird uprooted all of them during an epic battle.

Through it all were hints of how the Quileute once lived – meals of whale and seal and fish eggs, boats made into houses, war and slavery, women grinding fern roots into flour.

I led the applause when Jacob finished. This might have been one of his first times making such a presentation, but he was a great storyteller, whether it was because it was something the Quileute did a lot, or because he was a natural. I complimented him as the 11th graders rushed out to the parking lot and sports practice, and he blushed a little.

"Hey, would you like to come over for dinner sometime?" I asked once I knew my students were out of earshot. I had a double motive: I wanted to thank him for his presentation, of course, but I also had a favor to ask of him.

He looked surprised, and pleased. "Sure," he said cheerfully. "The weekends are best for me, because I can find coverage pretty easy."

"Coverage?"

"My dad's in a wheelchair. I just need to make sure someone's around in case he needs help."

"Oh, okay," I said, my estimation of Jacob rising by the second. "I'm going to Seattle this weekend, but how about the next Saturday?"

"I'll be there."

* * *

The Thursday of the same week found me pacing around my classroom desk, on my cellphone with Dowling's, the local garage. I'd taken in my Civic before the long drive to Seattle. I was now regretting it.

"I just don't understand how an oil change could go so wrong," I said into the phone. The school day was over, and a freshman straggler who passed by in the hallway glanced at me curiously as I complained. "Do you have a loaner car, maybe? No? … No, never mind. If I can get my own car back on Monday … yeah, I'll figure something out."

I hung up and punched in the numbers for Raquel. Voice mail. "Hey, sweetie," I said, giving a wave to Alice Cullen as she strolled into the room. Damn, she had great clothes – today she was wearing a cozy-looking cream and gray knitted dress and tights that were easy for her to carry off with her slender figure. "Listen, my car's out of commission, but I'm definitely coming tomorrow. I'll just take the bus to SeaTac and then the train from there. I might be late. And maybe you can figure out another way to get to the race? Call me."

By the time I hung up, Alice was talking on her own cell, and holding her finger up in a signal for me to hold on a minute. Students weren't supposed to have cellphones in school, but since it was after hours, I couldn't be bothered to care. As I waited I glanced over at the ceiling panel above hers and Edward's desks. The maintenance crew hadn't found any vermin, dead or alive.

"… I think that will be fine. Hold on, I'll ask her." Keeping her phone to her ear, Alice looked at me and said, "I came by to ask you about our assignment, and I couldn't help overhearing about your car, Ms. Swan. But listen, my mom and I are driving to Seattle tomorrow. It wouldn't be any trouble to take you too. Esme's on the phone right now, and she said I should ask you."

I gaped at her, uncertain what to do. It'd certainly be more convenient to get a ride to the city, and not to have to ask Mike or Angela to drive me to the bus in Port Angeles, but I had to make sure her brother wasn't part of the excursion.

"Um, are you certain you have enough room?" I asked warily.

"We have plenty!" Alice's tone turned cajoling. "Really. It's just Esme and me having a little quality time, going to the opera and such. She'll be glad there's someone else for me to talk to on the drive in. I get 'overly loquacious' sometimes, as she says." Alice shoved her cell toward me so I could hear Esme's laugh. Even over the phone it was entrancing.

"Actually, I would need to do some work in the car," I warned Alice.

"I promise, I won't bother you when you need to correct the vocabulary quiz," she said, drawing a halo in the air above her head. "Come on, Esme wants to talk to you and set everything up."

I gave in, and reached for her phone.

* * *

The next afternoon, a gleaming black Mercedes with tinted windows pulled up into my driveway. Such an expensive car had probably never been so close to my little house.

I was walking onto my porch when Alice Cullen bounded out of the passenger side of the Mercedes. She met me as my boot squelched into my sodden lawn. "Hi, Ms. Swan, is that all you're bringing?" she asked.

I glanced down. I had an overnight bag in one hand, and a cooler bag filled with food for Raquel in the other. "Why? Am I missing something?"

"What about your bike?"

When my car was working, I had indeed planned to take my bike with me, but I had given up the idea. "Uh, no, how would I transport -" I stopped as Alice pointed to the Mercedes. There was a bike rack on the roof. Surely this was the only Mercedes sedan in existence with a bike rack. "Oooookay. But I don't want to –"

The driver's side door opened, and Alice's mother stepped out. "It won't be a bother," Esme Cullen said in her soothing voice. "Give us your bags and go fetch your bike."

I was hauling it over the porch steps when I heard a familiar voice shouting from across the street. Oh, give me a break.

"Yo," Justin Stanley, wearing an A&Fitch hoodie, called out, "do you want help with that?" An instant later, the back door of the Mercedes opened and Edward Cullen stepped out of it.

My heart dropped. Damn, I was going to have to back out of this trip.

"I've got it," Edward told Justin, who was still making his way toward us, unheeding of the coldness in his older classmate's voice – a coldness I remembered well.

"Edward decided at the last minute to join us," Alice said quietly to me when I had pushed my bike up to her and Esme.

"Did he know that I was coming with you?" I said just as quietly.

"Of course," Esme said. She shrugged gracefully, and ducked back into the car. I exhaled in relief, then tensed up again. Edward might be okay with my presence now that I had stayed away from him for all these weeks, but I still had to control myself and not betray my infatuation. I was suddenly grateful for all the homework I had to grade on the ride.

I looked over to see that Edward and Justin were staring at each other, and they both seemed like such stereotypical would-be alpha males that I rolled my eyes.

Then I winked at Alice and she seemed to sense what I had in mind, because she grinned. "One two three," she whispered, and we hoisted my bike into the wheel tray of the roof rack. With Alice's help it was surprisingly easy. Justin's head whipped around and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. And Edward Cullen's, too.

"Thanks, guys," Alice sang out as I snapped the locks on the wheels closed. "We've got it all covered."

"See you in class, Mr. Stanley," I said as Justin started slouching back to the Stanley McMansion, probably pissed off at me again.

Once we were settled in the car, me keeping a prudent distance from Edward in the back seat, Alice turned around to her brother. "What was with the testosterone display, chum?"

"Justin Stanley is a loathsome boy and I don't want his hands touching anything of mine," he said, staring down at his laptop as he typed. He exuded tension.

"Don't hold back your feelings," Alice said, smirking.

"Besides, dear, this is my car," Esme said. "And Ms. Swan's bike."

"Yes, but—" he stopped abruptly. "Never mind."

There was silence a moment as Edward opened his window and then closed it, and Alice asked what my plans were for the weekend.

"They're my friend Raquel's plans, and I'm not sure about all of them," I said. "But I know that tonight I'm going to the opening of her show –"

"A play? Or an art show?" The question came from Esme.

"An art show. She's a painter." Esme hmmed in encouragement and I went on. "It's at some place called the Statler warehouse."

"In Georgetown?" It was a reasonable guess - Georgetown, an industrial neighborhood turned artist hangout, was known for its open studios and art walks.

"No," I said, adjusting the jacket covering my lap. I had dressed for Raquel's opening, and my outfit was shorter and tighter than anything I would wear to school. I didn't want to harass Edward Cullen with my exposed thighs. "I think most of the others in the show do have studios in Georgetown but you know how artists are – if everyone's doing one thing, they decide it's time to go do something else. So the curator found a real estate developer who's letting her use this space for the weekend in Pioneer Square near a bunch of established galleries. She's hoping for spillover, I think."

"That's not far from our hotel. What is your friend's work like?" Esme asked as we made the first of Highway 101's many crossings of the Sol Duc River. She actually seemed interested, which I hadn't expected. Esme seemed to sense my surprise because she added, "I do interior decorating work, so I'm often in the market for art."

"Oh. Well, she does portraits of her friends, mostly. Her stuff reminds me a lot of Elizabeth Peyton, do you know her?"

"Yes!" Alice burbled. She might have been bouncing in her leather seat a bit, too. "We saw a show of her work at the New Museum in New York. I remember the Kurt Cobain portrait."

I was taken aback for a moment, then mentally shook myself. The Cullens were, it seemed, operagoers and art lovers too, and I needed to get used to it.

"Well, don't tell Raquel I said that, because of course she resents being compared to Peyton," I said.

"That sort of thing also sounds familiar," Esme said. "And what else are you doing this weekend?"

"Raquel signed us up for a trail race on Sunday morning in a park outside of Seattle, Cougar Mountain."

"Don't you need a ride?" Esme asked, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

I shook my head. Ben from the commune had a car, but he was out of town meeting a publisher, and Raquel had charmed the potter who lived down the hall from her into taking us.

"Raquel's getting some guy to drive us there," I said. In my peripheral vision, I saw Edward jerk his head up.

"Oh, you'll have good weather for the race," Alice said. "I read that it's going to be sunny on Sunday."

Huh, the forecast must have changed, but that was good, because maybe I'd be less likely to dirty this pristine car with muddy trail shoes. Next to me, Edward's head was bowed again, and his hands were moving on the keyboard with astonishing speed. I couldn't help glancing at the screen of his computer. It was covered in fever charts and ticker symbols.

"Oh, is there an investment club at school?" I asked, even though as I said it I realized that the idea was unlikely. Edward looked up, startled, but Alice answered for him.

"At Forks High? C'mon. But Edward plays around with stocks on his own," she said. "He has quite the knack for it. And sometimes I give him advice."

Christ, so the Cullens had enough money to set up a brokerage account for their teenage son to fool around with. Even aside from their beauty, brains and unexplainable speed, they obviously lived in a different world from me. I sighed and reached into my bag for those vocabulary quizzes, then tucked in the jacket around my legs more securely. Edward had opened his window again, and chilly air whistled into the car loudly enough to make conversation difficult. But I didn't want to complain, so I turned to my work. Can you use "inscrutably" in a sentence, Mr. Stanley? Ah, I see that you can't.

Unfortunately, Justin Stanley's sentences –"She was _inscrutably_ shaking her hips" – weren't enough to distract me from the physical presence of the silent, tense boy next to me. If I could, if I was stupid enough, uncontrolled enough, to touch his jaw, it would feel like a rock under my fingers, I was certain.

Once we reached the bridge over the Hood Canal to the Kitsap Peninsula, we had to wait for a naval ship to navigate the drawspan. As soon as we stopped in the line of cars, Edward bolted. As I had watched him do before.

From the back window, I could see him slumping against the trunk, running his hand through hair that must have been getting damp in the drizzle.

"Poor guy," Alice told me. "He sometimes gets overwhelmed on long trips."

And in my classroom. And in the school parking lot when he's next to me. And now in the car next to me. "Huh," I said.

The scene was repeated in the ferry line on Bainbridge Island, but this time I looked away, my hair shielding me from the sight of Edward Cullen's discomfort. I didn't need to see this yet again.

Edward opted not to even return to the car, walking onto the ferry instead and disappearing inside. I hadn't made this trip enough to be jaded by the view, and Alice and Esme joined me at the railing for the half-hour crossing as we watched nighttime Seattle come closer, lights twinkling in the skyscraper forest of downtown.

It was a short drive from the ferry to Raquel's vernissage. We pulled up to the old brick warehouse, and this time Edward got to show off his manly bike-hauling skills. I spaced out for a moment at the sight, reminded of how he had seized my bike and pulled me out of the path of the food-service van.

"Would you like me to lock up your bike? Ms. Swan?" he asked, his question yanking me back to the present.

"Um, yeah, thanks," I mumbled, dropping the key for my U-lock into his outstretched palm, careful not to touch him. He wheeled my bike to an iron railing along the sidewalk, next to what I recognized as Raquel's own bike, and I turned away to thank Esme for the ride.

"I can't believe that Dowling's didn't have the part my Civic needed," I added apologetically. "Civics are the most common car in the country."

"Not in Forks," Alice pointed out.

The Cullens seemed to be waiting for me to go inside, so we said goodbye until Sunday and I made my way down a half flight of iron steps to the open door of the temporary gallery. A murmur of voices spilled out.

"Bella!" Raquel called to me immediately, breaking off from the clutch of guys around her. She was wearing a cream leather minidress that she had picked up at a secondhand store in Ballard. The color complemented her tan skin and the asymmetric hem showed off her lean runner's legs.

"You look amazing," I told her after we hugged. "So, where are the arty musicians? And the wine?"

"I've got some of both for you, but patience," she said, snickering. "Let's go find Bree so we can stash your bags someplace safe."

I started to follow her toward the back of the long, narrow room, scanning the stark white walls as we went, then stopped short.

"You _didn't_," I breathed out. Raquel spun around, and I could see on her face that she knew what I was talking about.

"Bree was looking through what I had, and she really, really liked it," Raquel said.

"But –"

"She said it was a great picture," Raquel went on.

"But –"

"And it'll be up just for the weekend. I knew if I told you it was here you'd try to skip this."

I glared at my best, betraying friend. "If it sells, you owe me a really expensive dinner. Someplace French."

My eyes flashed back to the wall. The paintings in Raquel's section of the show were all familiar to me – friends, members of her family, even a couple of me - but one made my stomach twist. The woman in it was lying on her right side, one arm above her head, dark hair spilling around her. She was mostly under a white sheet, obviously naked, a crescent of blush areola peeking out, lines of her body clear under the thin material. Her eyes were closed though she wasn't asleep, but stretching luxuriously.

I knew that not because of Raquel's figurative skill, but because the model was me.

"You redid the background. And the blanket," I said. Raquel hadn't shown this in public before because she was unhappy with the look of the red blanket that draped over my legs. I didn't really mind the painting being on display – I had posed for it after all, so I knew what I was getting into - but it was unsettling to be here, clothed, in the same room as it.

"Yeah, Bree convinced me to finish it … hey, Bree!" Raquel waved at a small woman with blue-streaked dark hair who was approaching us, dressed in mandatory Curator Black and carrying a small sheet of adhesive red dots. "This is my friend Bella."

"Bree Tanner," the woman said, taking my hand. She was younger than us and almost as short as Alice Cullen. "I love Raquel's picture of you."

I managed to suppress my eye roll. "It's great that you were able to put this show together," I said politely instead. "Your professor should be impressed."

"Bree, can Bella put her things in the closet?" Raquel asked.

Bree nodded, gave me a key, and pointed me in the right direction. On the way back, I stopped by the makeshift drinks table. Bree had left a folder with a pricelist resting on top of the table, next to the magnum of Trader Joe red that had been my goal. I scanned the list for Raquel's paintings, and forgetting all about pouring myself a glass, marched over to where my friend was now talking with a tall, good-looking blond guy. I pulled her aside.

"If you get that much money for my naked painting, you're taking me to dinner in Paris," I hissed at her.

"If I get that much money, I can _afford_ to take you to Paris." She grinned, then shrugged. "Bree figured that pricing that piece so high would make the other ones look like a steal. Here, meet Riley."

Riley was the good-looking blond guy. I found out that he had started out at Oregon State, then followed a teacher here to Udub, and was now working on his M.F.A. He did vaguely political assemblage and collage.

"This guy looks familiar," I said in front of one collage after Raquel went off to get drinks.

"It's Robert La Follette, " Riley said, and the name clicked from high school history class. The turn-of –the-last century Progressive governor of Wisconsin. Riley started talking about how his work was a comment on the union-busting tactics of the current Wisconsin governor, but I kept staring at La Follette's hair in the appropriated photograph. I had thought of the men of that era having slicked down, pomaded hair, but this guy had a lion's mane, wild and untamed. Familiar indeed.

Bree came by to put a red Sold dot on the title card, giving Riley a wink.

"Congratulations," I told him.

"My parents," he said wryly.

Raquel came back, with, finally, a glass of wine for me, and took me around the rest of the show. There was a floor installation of little scraps of velvet and plasticine dribbles; a group of canvases that had been coated in silver so that the viewer could see herself hazily reflected in the surface; taxidermied rats sitting down for meals at dollhouse tables.

A video installation was in a corner, all blue light, groans and a blindfolded guy with his jeans around his calves as the text of 2008 Republican Party platform scrolled over his image. I took a peek and retreated hastily, mouthing, "What the fuck?" at Raquel.

She wrinkled her nose in disdain. "Yeah, I know, so transgressive, huh?" she whispered. "Or rather, so '90s."

"Or maybe he just likes whacking off in front of a camera," I whispered back.

"Or maybe his _professor _liked him whacking off in front of a camera."

I shuddered. "Okay, that's much more disturbing." Compared to that, my nip slip was G-rated.

The vernissage wound down, prompting Raquel to get Riley and some other people together to go to a low-key bar nearby. So I found myself sitting at a table surrounded by grad-student artists snarfing up fries, and bitching about other artists and their day jobs. My own day job left them baffled.

It was a relief when Bree, who had stayed behind to close up the temporary gallery for the night, came in and pulled a chair up next to me. She was on a high from the opening, and the sales, and chatty.

And she had an interesting story. She had run away from her violent father in Coeur d'Alene and lived on the streets in Seattle before landing in foster care; she aged out and faced being on her own again. Then a miracle happened.

"When you're in foster care, and you turn 18, that's it for you, the state has no more responsibility for you, you know?" Bree said.

I nodded. "Yeah, some of my students are foster kids," I said.

"Right. So there you are with no family, no money, no skills, and you're on your own. But this foundation contacted me and offered to pay my way through college – it's some sort of pilot program, with its own social workers. And I'll graduate without any loans. I'm so fucking lucky. I'd write a thank-you letter to Mr. Pacific Northwest Trust if I knew who he was." She plunked her empty beer bottle on the table. "Where's the waiter?"

"I'll go get you another," I said. "I need one myself."

I made my way to the bar. From a speaker nearby came music I knew – a song from the Raveonettes album that had been released earlier in the year. I hummed along idly as I waited to order before remembering the lyrics:

_And I need you/ and I forget that you're young/ and I please you/ and I know that you're so young./and I hurt you/ and I forget that you're young._

I so did not need to hear this. I abandoned the bar and went outside to the sidewalk. The drizzle had stopped, and a half-moon glowed above, reflecting off the wet street. A couple walked by, tipsy and amorous. I watched them with envy.

"Bella? You okay?" A voice said behind me. Riley.

"Uh, yeah," I said. He was close enough to me that I had to look up at him. "I just need to clear my head for a moment. What about you?"

"Eh, I need to go soon." Riley scratched his stubble. "I have band practice in the morning."

"Really? What do you play?" I asked. Damn, the arty musician Raquel had promised me. And if he played ….

"Drums."

Yeah, that was it. Drummers had a certain, um, athletic appeal. I was suddenly reminded of the advantages of getting laid in Seattle.

"And what do you guys sound like?"

"A bad imitation of every band Jack White's been in."

"Nice," I said, laughing. A nice-looking guy who knew how to poke fun at himself. That was good.

We talked about music a while, and while we didn't agree on everything, we were close enough. I was properly admiring of his getting to go to the sold-out M83 concert the next night. And with his adorable fidgeting, he was like a textbook example of a guy flirting. Bree inside had probably given up my getting her a beer.

"Listen," he said after a while, reaching over to brush a strand of my hair over my shoulder. "I really do need to go. Um, I left my car over by the warehouse. Do you need a ride?"

The corner of my mouth lifted. Oh, could I use a ride.

Just then, an old VW bus ground its gears as it lumbered up the hill, catching my attention. My eyes met those of Edward Cullen on the sidewalk across the street. Then I blinked against the glare of the VW's lights and he was gone.

He was always gone.

I scowled. Not only was an imaginary Edward Cullen blocking my efforts to get myself off, he was blocking my efforts to get myself off with other people.

Fuck my life. Sex for sex's sake, I had no problem with. Sleeping with one guy while being unable to stop thinking of another, though … that was pathetic.

My mood deflated, I turned back to Riley. "Hey, that's really nice of you, but Raquel and I have our bikes here, so that doesn't make sense for us," I said, answering his literal question instead of the one he was really asking: do you want me to show you my drumming?

The flash of rejection on his face was succeeded by indifference, and he shrugged. "Sure."

I went back into the bar to get Raquel and go home and to bed. At least I could cuddle up with my fake girlfriend tonight.

* * *

Two days later, Raquel and I walked to Elliott Bay Book Company, which wasn't far from her apartment. We had run our race that morning – under sunny skies, just as Alice Cullen had said – but now it was dark, and soon I would be heading back to little, bookstore-less Forks.

Once inside, Raquel headed to the art books, and I to literature. There was a sizable collection of Penguins here; I was willing to pay a little more for them because the annotations were so good. I picked out a few, setting them down as I pulled out a Guy de Maupassant novel, "Bel-Ami," incorrectly shelved among the D's. I had studied French in college, and knew I should try to read more of it so I wouldn't forget it. I skimmed the novel for a few minutes, noting that the writing was relatively simple, then put it back with a sigh.

"Not a fan of Maupassant?" a smooth voice murmured next to me. I jumped. Edward Cullen, but this time indisputably in the flesh. His silent approach, and then his proximity, made my pulse speed up.

"Hi. Um, no, I thought I should try reading it in the original. Maybe I can find a used copy online," I replied, taking in my student's lean form in dark jeans and a plain long-sleeved blue T-shirt that was too closely fitted for my comfort. I turned away to stare at the black and orange spines of the books in front of me. Dante. Dickens, Dostoyevsky. Dumas père and Dumas fils, father and son. A misplaced Honoré de Balzac.

"It's not a difficult book. I can lend you my copy," he said absently, his eyes also on the shelves. I froze. Do not act as if that is out of the ordinary, I told myself. Just talk normally. Don't scare him off.

"What about Dumas?" I said, touching "Camille."

"Quite easy as well. Not as convoluted as his father. Still, I loved "The Count of Monte Cristo" as a boy. Such a satisfying revenge fantasy. I even foolishly envied the count's ability to forgo eating and sleeping."

"I always felt sorry for Mercédès," I said, thinking of the count's first sweetheart, who is forced by circumstances to marry someone she doesn't love, who does nothing wrong except grow old.

"True. The count loved her, he did all this for her, and then … he barely makes an effort to persuade her to be with him before he takes off with Haydée."

"Maybe it's more realistic, though," I said. "A younger woman and all that."

"It's not what I would –''

"Ms. Swan! Hello!" It was Alice's chiming voice coming from the end of our row. She skipped up to us. "We were on our way to your friend's place and I had a hunch you'd be here."

"Hi, Alice! How was your weekend?" I asked, as I leaned down to gather up the paperbacks I had chosen. Alice looked at them in malicious delight.

"Oooh, I can't believe my English teacher hasn't read 'Middlemarch!'" she said gleefully.

I affected indignation. "I'm merely replacing my copy, since it has disintegrated from being paged through so much," I said.

Alice giggled. "You are a bad liar, Ms. Swan."

"I know," I said ruefully. "Eliot's not even a dead white male, and I somehow managed to miss her. Don't tattle on me, please."

"I think you're safe from scorn at Forks High." She snorted. "I suspect Mr. Berty hadn't read most of the books he assigned to us. 'Prince of Tides,' really?"

She was probably right about that, but I was duty-bound as teacher to give Alice a reproving look. "Hey, a little respect, Ms. Cullen," I said. "Is your mother here too?"

"She's probably buried in the art books," Edward said.

"Oh, then Raquel will right next to her," I said. Edward suddenly looked impatient to leave, and I was disappointed that once more he seemed to want to get away from me.

As I had predicted, Esme and Raquel were at a long table of expensive art books, oblivious to each other, Raquel off to the side looking at her phone. Alice called to her mother, I to my friend, and they looked up simultaneously.

I made the introductions. "Esme, this is my friend Raquel Salcedo. Raquel, Esme Cullen, Alice and Edward."

Raquel seemed to freeze in shock for a few seconds, just as Eliza Teague's mother had, at the sight of the Cullens, and I could just imagine her thinking _holyshitholyshitholyshit_ in a loop as everyone waved hello. I chanced a glance at Edward and saw the frustrated expression that he wore so often as he looked at me. Maybe he just found everyone outside his family lacking in some way.

"How was the race?" Esme asked me.

"It was fun," I said.

"What she means to say-" Raquel had recovered her power of speech "-was that we won our age group, but we got geezered."

Esme looked confused, and Raquel went on, "Guys say when a woman passes them in a race that they got chicked. We got geezered by a 45-year-old."

I rolled my eyes. "That's not uncommon at distance," I pointed out.

"Ah, yes," Esme said, smirking. "I've heard that older people have more stamina."

Alice seemed to find this hilarious. It was actually reassuring to see her acting immature. Edward continued to look frustrated.

"You're a painter, Bella tells us," Esme said to Raquel.

"Yeah," Raquel answered, and she pointed at me, "and I'm taking Bella to France!"

I inhaled sharply. "Are you serious?"

She waved her phone. "Bree just texted me. Some guy just bought the big painting and four others."

"That's wonderful," Esme said. "I buy a bit of art myself. Maybe I know the collector?"

"I doubt it, because Bree hadn't heard of him. And he didn't even ask for the discount. Someone named Jenkins, Jenks, something like that. A lawyer."

"Ugh, he's going to hang it in his office?" I asked.

Raquel snickered. "Would you rather he hang it in his _bedroom_?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

"Fine. Both ideas are icky."

"Maybe he's just starting a collection," Esme suggested. "Why do you owe Bella a trip to Europe?"

Raquel grinned at me. "Because that big painting was of her, and I embarrassed her monumentally by hanging it in the show. I promised I'd make it up to her."

"You're embarrassing me right now," I muttered.

"Oh, come on. You look beautiful in it, if I say so myself. And you're pretty well covered, even if you are nak -"

"Raquel!" I hissed.

"All right, all right," Raquel said, and turned to Esme. I could see how giddy Raquel was about the sales. "It's a painting of Bella, but it's sort of a take on Manet's 'Olympia,' you know the kept-woman picture? Which has all sorts of problems of racism and sexism, but the way he contrasts Olympia's pale skin with the white sheets on her bed, I love. So I tried that, though Bella's less naked."

I groaned, and Raquel barreled on, "Hey, you should be grateful my inspiration wasn't 'The Origin of the World.'" Oh no, there was no chance that my freakishly cultivated students didn't know Courbet's infamous 19th century crotch shot. I wanted to sink into the ground.

"I need to buy these," I muttered, lifting my load of books slightly in emphasis.

"We'll drive you two over to Raquel's apartment so you can pick up your things," Esme said, and I mumbled an okay, not sure I wanted Raquel and the Cullens in the same car discussing my painted alter ego.

As we left the store, Edward offered to take my bag of books, and I wondered if Esme had ordered him to do so, whispering as parents do to their children to do something polite. No, she was still talking with Raquel. I thought about refusing –I'd run 10 miles that day, and well, and didn't need any help - but I didn't want to rebuff him when he was willingly interacting with me. I handed the bag over.

The Mercedes was just across the street. Raquel sat in the front passenger seat, and Alice between me and Edward in the back, her tiny body close to mine. It was like sitting alongside an icicle, a function, I guessed, of her having like 5 percent body fat.

Something seemed to come over Raquel as we drove the few blocks to her apartment. She started answering Esme's remarks with monosyllables, and this time it wasn't Edward but Raquel who sprang from the car as soon as it stopped, mumbling a goodbye to the Cullens.

"Are you going to be okay?" I asked as I joined her on the sidewalk.

"Yeah, I just felt claustrophobic in the car for some reason." She looked a little nauseated. "Or maybe I'm wiped out from the race this morning."

"Or maybe luxury cars have that effect on you. C'mon, I gotta get my stuff."

"Are you going to be all right going back with them?" Raquel asked when we reached her apartment.

"Sure," I answered, puzzled. "Why wouldn't I be? Esme's great, isn't she?"

"Yeah, she's really nice, but …" Raquel trailed off. "There's something very odd about them."

"Like oddly attractive and polite and well-spoken?" I picked up my overnight bag and the cooler bag, now heavy with stuff I'd bought from the farmers' market we had visited yesterday and the food co-op down the street. Lucky Raquel, surrounded by so many choices, and she didn't even cook much. "As far as oddities go, I can live with it."

"I suppose. All right, get home safe," she said, and gave me a fierce hug. "And I'll see you soon! You know what I want when I come for Thanksgiving, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said, and smiled at her mischievously. "And after a weekend in Forks, you'll probably want to move there."

"Um, I doubt it," she said, her eyes flickering to her living room window, which overlooked the street where Edward Cullen was hoisting my bike atop his mother's car.

As we headed toward downtown Seattle and the ferry, Alice told me about the opera she'd seen, "The Makropulos Affair," a Janacek work that I hadn't heard of. It involved a talented, beautiful singer who had an elixir for immortality, but then decided after a few hundred years that living forever, alone, wasn't worth it.

"Did you go, Edward?" I ventured, since he hadn't opened his ever-present laptop yet.

"No." He grimaced. "I wasn't in the mood for Janacek."

"You don't like his music?"

"I don't like the libretto. I hope Raquel is feeling better," he said, with an abrupt change of subject. "Have you known her a long time? Is she from Arizona too? Did you go to college together?"

I had a sudden inappropriate flare of jealousy – this was an inordinate amount of interest, wasn't it, in my gorgeous best friend? But I tried to answer casually, and fully, because again, Edward Cullen was actually talking.

"She was looking better when I left her. And yes to all three questions. She's why I moved to Seattle. And her background is really interesting. She's Tohono O'odham, and she grew up on the reservation in Arizona – her name's Salcedo because a grandfather was from the Sonoran branch of the nation. Her first language is Tohono O'odham, or rather an unusual dialect of it. She became quite a darling of the linguistics department at the university… "

His face seemed to clear as I spoke, and I suddenly noticed how close we were to each other. I slid on the black leather seat closer to the window. Edward flipped open his laptop and started typing, and he didn't say a word more until we reached the ferry to Bainbridge.

This time, all four of us walked out onto the deserted deck to watch Seattle get smaller, but after a few minutes both Esme and Alice complained that they were cold and went inside the cabin. I should have gone with them, but I wasn't ready to say goodbye to Seattle, the city of arty musicians who wanted to show me their drumming, the city Fate apparently didn't want me to live in. Instead she wanted me to live in a bald spot in the middle of the forest and pine for a boy I couldn't touch and whom I made uncomfortable.

I leaned over the railing, getting a last glimpse of the pyramid top of the Smith Tower, and shivered. "Take my jacket," Edward Cullen said, and had it draped over my shoulders before I could answer.

I bit back an automatic objection, and the wool collar of the jacket brushed my cheek as I turned to thank him, and I breathed in. My God, it smelled … not at all like teenage boy. Considering how sensitive he seemed to be to odors, I had to think that it wasn't cologne, but him. I breathed in again, and realized that he was gazing at me curiously.

No, this was wrong.

I shrugged off the jacket and pressed it into his hands. "Thanks," I said, "but you should keep it. I need to go back inside anyway."

I scurried to the cabin, but I couldn't resist glancing at him I opened the door. The jacket was still in his hands, but at his face. I could have sworn he was sniffing it. Depressed at the sight, I stepped into the light and the noise of the cabin.

* * *

_Chapter title: "Real and magical," from "Black Cat" by Ladytron. (If you have a better translation, let me know!)_

_Since I shamelessly appropriated all the works in the chapter, art links on my profile page._

_Thanks for reading and reviewing!_


	6. Correr es mi destino

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer._

_This is up for fic of the week at The Lemonade Stand, thanks to Nic, Dolly Reader and Twific Crackmum! There's a link on my profile page, or go to tehlemonadestand net._

_Thanks to Camilla10, Mr. Price, and those of you who've nominated or voted for this story and "Getting Warmer."_

_Some of you asked about the stories Jacob tells in the last chapter. They're all "real" – an anthropologist from Brigham Young University collected them in the 1930s._

_Recap: In the last chapter, Jacob gives a presentation to Bella's class on Quileute legends, and she invites him to dinner. Alice offers Bella a ride to Seattle after her car goes out of commission, and Edward comes along. Bella meets Riley and Bree at the art show and discovers that Raquel is displaying a picture of her. When the Cullens and Bella meet up again at Elliott Bay Books, Raquel learns that a mysterious collector has bought the painting. Raquel gets freaked out by being in a car with the Cullens. _

* * *

Chapter 6: Correr es mi destino

Something seemed to change in Edward Cullen after that weekend. He stopped staring at his desk and started looking where he was supposed to. At me.

At his _teacher_, I reminded myself.

And as a teacher, I had to approve. As someone who was trying to keep her wits about her – well, thinking Edward Cullen hated me was depressing, but thinking that he didn't was … dangerous.

Self-control, Swan.

In AP English we were in the extra-long (courtesy of Val Berty) Shakespeare unit, and I was taking a break on the homework by having my students memorize speeches from the plays and recite them in class.

Although I had encouraged them to work on bits that had famous lines that could prove useful on the AP test – Jaques's "All the world's a stage" monologue, Shylock's "Do we not bleed?," Macbeth's "Out, out brief candle" - the Cullens, of course, chose their own path.

Alice did a comic interp version of the Pyramus and Thisbe "play" about forbidden love in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" (_O dainty duck! O dear!_) **!**that had every one laughing … except her own brother, which made me wonder about his sense of humor. He followed Alice's charming performance by stepping to the front of the room to deliver Othello's speech as he watches Desdemona sleep:

_Yet I'll not shed her blood;  
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,  
And smooth as monumental alabaster.  
_

Othello muses that if he snuffs a candle, he can relight it, but he can't do that with Desdemona's life -

_When I have pluck'd the rose,  
I cannot give it vital growth again.  
It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree._

Edward Cullen paused. "Kissing her," said the stage direction in my Shakespeare anthology. I tried to keep my eyes on the book and away from my student, but his silence continued. Had he forgotten the next lines?

I broke and looked at him. He was still, only his jaw working, his hands fisted at his sides. He inhaled, finally, and went on:

_I must weep,  
But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly;  
It strikes where it doth love._

He finished with a glance at me and then promptly returned to his desk, not acknowledging the sincere applause that followed.

As I biked home after school on the wet road, wishing I had fenders, I pondered his choice of those lines. An unusual choice – they didn't qualify as obscure, but who would decide to memorize them unless they held some special meaning? And a few moments after Othello says them, he kills the woman he loves, convinced that, because of his nature, she can't have truly loved him back. Cheerful stuff.

Or maybe, Bella, the boy just flipped through the Shakespeare anthology and randomly picked out enough lines to fulfill the assignment. He is a 17-year-old, after all. It's like Rimbaud's line 100 years ago: _On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans._ No one is serious at 17. You have to remember that.

I really had to.

* * *

At lunch the next day, Bruce Clapp was ranting about the management of the Teachers' Pension and Annuity Fund. I bit into my last apple from the farmers' market in Raquel's neighborhood, trying to keep my gaze from wandering over to the table where I knew the Cullens were sitting. On one side of me Angela was shaking her head and on the other Natalie Marshall was stabbing her fork into her pasta salad.

"Give us a break, Bruce," Natalie said in irritation. "There's no way that pension fund will still be in existence when I retire."

"Yah! Social Security won't even be around when Bella and I retire," Angela said.

"Is that how you feel too, Bella?" the Clapp said, affronted.

I shrugged. "I am absolutely certain that I will never draw a pension."

"It's exactly that kind of attitude that guarantees you'll be eating cat food when you're 70," Bruce thundered, slamming his hand down on the lunch table. The force was strong enough to spill Barbara Goff's soup and jostle my elbow so my apple went flying.

It fell to the floor just in time for it to be kicked toward the trash cans by Andy Marks, too engrossed in flirting with Shelby Wells walking next to him to notice what his feet were doing. I sighed and went to retrieve it. It was no longer edible, and I shoved it into my lunch bag to compost at home.

"Bella, do you want my apple?" Bruce rolled his across the table toward me. It was dark red and waxed. A Red Delicious from Thriftway. I already knew it would be mealy and bland. "My wife always packs one for me, but I never eat them."

"Thanks, that's very kind," I said, and placed it on top of my lunch bag, hoping he wouldn't notice that I hadn't bitten.

* * *

That afternoon on my run, my thoughts were again consumed by, duh, Edward Cullen. In class we'd started "Romeo and Juliet," a story of teenagers being silly and overdramatic and horny (though of course I had to ignore all the "prick" puns), but saying some gorgeous lines in the process. We'd just discussed the meaning of the Prince's comment about "purple fountains issuing from your veins," and I asked if anyone knew what Shakespeare was saying by naming Romeo's friends Mercutio and Benvolio.

Silence. I turned to the whiteboard to write down the names so we could dissect them together, and in my peripheral vision noticed a hand up in the Cullen quadrant of the room. "Ms. Cullen," I said reflexively.

More silence, and then a couple of titters. I turned around to see that it wasn't Alice volunteering an answer.

"Excuse me, Mr. Cullen," I said, trying to mask my surprise.

"Uh, yeah, I think he's trying to tell the reader that, you know, Mercutio is mercurial, 'cause his mood swings a lot. It's from the planet Mercury, I guess?" Edward Cullen said as I stared. His leg jiggled as if he were nervous, while his classmates took notes, apparently finding the situation not at all strange. "And Benvolio is, like, benevolent, since he stops the fight between the servants?"

I had to open and close my mouth once before I could manage, "Yes, thank you, Mr. Cullen."

My feet struck the damp dirt of the trail snaking before me as I thought about this exchange. That Edward Cullen had the right answer didn't astonish me. That he expressed himself like such a _teenager_ did.

I heard a sudden noise that made me jerk my gaze up from the path. Blocking my way was something golden-eyed, growling and lethal. I stopped short, lost my balance and took a digger into the dirt.

Ouch! And shit! I knew that moving deliberately and making yourself look bigger were the rules when you encountered a mountain lion, and I had broken them both. Should I stay down to protect my most vulnerable parts or should I get up and face the predator? There was no more growling, and I couldn't tell if the cat had decided to back away or come closer.

Up, I thought frantically. I had to get up. There was a rock near my hand and I clawed it out of the soft ground as I tried to find my feet.

Then my breath left me in a loud, relieved gasp, for where the mountain lion had been seconds before was another golden-eyed, but much more welcome, creature.

"Miss Swan? Are you hurt? Are you bleeding?" Edward Cullen asked, but remained where he was. Oh, I still had the rock clutched in my muddy hand, ready to throw.

"No – no, I'm okay. I saw a cougar … a mountain lion … whatever there is here," I wheezed, letting the stone fall as I sank back onto my heels and tried to calm my breathing. "And now it's gone."

"Cats can be very volatile, especially ones incautious enough to venture close to a populated area." He moved to my side, then crouched down slowly as if I myself were some volatile wild animal. "Are you hurt?" he asked again. "Did you hit your head?"

"No. Did you see the lion?"

"I could see the paw prints on the trail," he answered, nodding to where the cat had confronted me.

"Maybe you spooked it off?"

"Hmm. It might have felt trapped, being between us. Can you walk?" He rose and offered me his hand. I grabbed it with my cold, dirty one, but he didn't flinch.

I had smears of mud all along my running tights, and my ankle protested as I took a step. Edward steadied me under my elbows as I faltered. Damn, it was going to be a shivering, unpleasant walk home.

"I can carry you," Edward said behind me.

"What? No, it's too far."

"I'll put you down if it's too much for me, I promise. Here, it'll be easier for me if you wear my jacket." He draped his peacoat over my shoulders and I slid my hands into the sleeves. The next second, he had swung me up, my legs draped over one arm, my own arms crossed over my chest. His gait was smooth, though his posture was curious, with my body not nestled against his, but resting on his arms. It was like being carried on a forklift.

It had to be really difficult and uncomfortable for him, but he wasn't even breathing hard.

"Thank you for coming to my rescue again," I said cautiously after a while, remembering how he reacted the last time I thanked him.

"You seem to make a habit of attracting danger and needing rescue," Edward said. This time he sounded not contemptuous but a little … smug?

"Twice is not a habit," I said, nettled. "And don't blame the victim."

"How do you know you haven't attracted danger from the first day of school? That would be three, and three's a trend. But -" he added, his tone suddenly losing all hint of smugness "- believe me, I don't blame the victim. It's certainly not your fault."

"That's more like it." I watched the firs and naked alders pass us for a while, then asked, "Do you think the cougar will come back? Or is it scared off for good?"

"I can't imagine that that cat will ever bother you again." I raised my eyebrows, because, really, how would he know? But his tone was so confident that I was reassured. And with that my mind turned to another question.

"I'm really glad you were there, but why _were_ you there?" I asked.

"I was on my way to your house, because I keep forgetting that copy of 'Bel-Ami' that I promised you. It's in the left pocket of my jacket." I patted the pocket, and yes, I could feel the corners of a book. Edward went on, "And it's not far from my house to yours through the woods."

"How do you know where my house is?"

He barked a short laugh. "_Everybody _knows, because Justin Stanley keeps telling everyone in hearing distance about Ms. Swan living across the street. He says he can see into your windows."

"_What_? I have curtains!" That jerk.

"Intelligent people know that just because Justin Stanley says something doesn't mean that it's true."

As I fumed, the trail branched off toward my place, and a few steps later we were in my back yard. With the change to daylight savings, dusk was now descending when I finished my run, and my house was gray in the dimming light.

Edward deposited me on the top step of my back porch and stepped away. He looked flustered. Huh. I had seen him look agonized, angry, annoyed, but this expression was new.

"Do you have a compress in your icebox?" he asked. I looked at him blankly. "For your ankle," he added, perhaps reckoning that I was still dazed by my encounter with the cougar.

Well, I was certainly dazed.

"Um, yes, there's a cold wrap in the freezer," I said finally, and he went inside. He came back a few seconds later and handed me the wrap before moving away to lean against the porch railing.

"Where are you from, Edward?" I asked, strapping the compress around my ankle.

"We were in Alaska before we moved here, but I was born in Chicago."

"You know, I don't think I've ever heard anyone outside an F. Scott Fitzgerald story use the word 'icebox.'"

He looked flustered again for a second, then his face smoothed over. "Oh, my father, Carlisle, has some linguistic oddities from growing up in England," he said. "Some of them are contagious. Don't forget this," he added, pushing away from the railing and plucking "Bel-Ami" from the pocket of the jacket I was still wearing. He laid the book on my lap.

Even in the twilight I could see that the volume was old, with a red leather cover crisscrossed with gold lines. "Thanks so much," I said. "And thanks again for helping me earlier."

"You're welcome. Can you make it inside?" he asked.

I nodded yes, standing up to prove it, the cold wrap velcro'd around my ankle, his book in my hand. "I think I didn't do any permanent damage," I said. I slipped his jacket off – a little reluctantly, because damn, it did smell good – and handed it over.

"Good night, Miss Swan," Edward said, shrugging on his coat, but he didn't leave.

"Good night," I answered, realizing that he was waiting for me. I limped to my door and went inside, resolutely not looking back.

After I scrubbed my hands to get the mud out from under my fingernails, I flipped open my computer for some music. I pulled up Garbage, loud guitars and tough-girl lyrics:

"I've got a fever of 110," I sang over Shirley Manson's better voice. "Come on, baby, be my bad boyfriend."

Edward Cullen did not have a fever of 110, but he would definitely be a bad boyfriend.

* * *

During my prep period the next day I went to do some etymological research on the Forks High library's surprisingly fast computers. So, let's see – for the Oxford English Dictionary, "icebox" was an Americanism. I then ran a Google Ngram query, and yep, "icebox" reached its peak usage in the 1940s, not long after Fitzgerald, and then dropped precipitously, what with people tossing their iceboxes out in favor of refrigerators and freezers.

Edward Cullen's grasp of linguistics was not nearly as impressive as his ability to show up in time to rescue me.

When I got back to my classroom, there was something new on my desk. A beautiful apple, with unblemished, unwaxed, mottled skin. I didn't recognize the variety, but I knew that it had never been near the Forks Thriftway. I touched it – and I knew if I bit into the flesh, it would be just how I liked it, firm, so firm that it was on the verge of under-ripe.

Perhaps I should have thought of gravity or temptation or even beautiful immortals warring over the apple of discord, but all I could wonder was: Could I eat it? If I washed it really carefully?

So I took it to the teachers' lounge and did just that. It was delicious, the flesh hard and bright white under the smooth skin. And as I ate it, I considered where it came from. Surely, if Bruce Clapp wanted to make amends for causing me to lose my apple, he would have given it to me in person, or left it with a note. The anonymity of the gift suggested a certain flirtatiousness, which was troubling. Someone had been watching me in the cafeteria. Maybe a student.

Maybe _that_ student.

Dream on, Swan. Or better yet, don't dream at all.

I sighed, and walked back to my classroom.

* * *

My SAT prep sessions were over, so for dinner that night, I had invited Angela, Tyler and Mike over, to give us a break from the diner.

Mike arrived first, and I smirked at his red Beemer as it pulled up. Second overpriced car in my driveway in a week.

"What's with that smile?" he asked as we hugged at the door.

"I always expect you to be driving a Jeep or something."

"Hey, just because I own a sporting-goods store doesn't mean I have to look like an outdoorsman all the time."

Over Mike's shoulder, I dutifully waved to my landlady, Sharon Stanley, who was staring at us from her front yard. She waved back. Why were the Stanleys always watching me? My life was humdrum - work, sleep, run … and, okay, getting confronted by cougars. Still, it wasn't as if I were getting nightly visits from my stable of attractive, age-appropriate lovers.

Pushing that thought away, I ushered Mike inside. "Speaking of the outdoors," I said, "I know there are cougars around here, but how often do they get close to town?"

"Never. Even the guides on our expeditions say they're rare. You worried about running into one?"

"Nah," I said, even though I was. "Come on, you can help me chop stuff for dinner."

* * *

On Thursday afternoon, my ankle felt fine, I'd had my rest day, and there was no reason not to run. Still, I lingered on my back porch, contemplating the gap in the trees that marked the opening to the trail. On Tuesday, I hadn't been frightened while Edward Cullen was with me. But now, forcefully aware of the presence of deadly creatures in these woods, I was nervous.

Deal with it, I lectured myself, you've run for years without being bothered by anything. That cougar was just an aberration. Mike told you that mountain lions stayed away from town, and he should know.

Besides, as deaths go, being torn apart by a wild beast had its good side: it would be, if not painless, very quick.

I walked to the forest's edge, then hesitated again, closing my eyes and steeling myself to go in. When I opened them, what I saw made my breath rush out in relief.

"Miss Swan?"

Once again, Edward Cullen was there, waiting, a few feet away. Instead of the jeans and wool jacket he was wearing last time, he was now dressed as a runner, in a gray T-shirt, track pants and a pair of spanking new Brookses.

"Edward!" I said, walking onto the trail. "What are you –"

"I thought you'd feel more comfortable if you had company today."

I didn't think about propriety and morality clauses. "I would," I said instantly.

I began to move past him, figuring that I'd be the rabbit and set the pace, but he stepped in front of me. "I'll lead the way," he said, and started off.

And so I followed. I had seen that he was an amazing sprinter, but I doubted that the sports-avoiding Edward Cullen had the experience to run at a steady clip. He proved me wrong, keeping precisely three strides ahead of me on the single track trail, his footsteps a metronome in the silent woods.

In fact, I started to wonder if this untrained boy was going to run rings around me, former Arizona Wildcat and fastest girl at Consolidated High.

"Edward," I called out at the halfway mark of my run, panting a bit. "Let's turn back at the next logging road."

"Of course." He wasn't breathing hard at all.

If I were a cross-country coach, I would so want him on my squad.

Once we reached the fork to my house, we jogged side by side, cooling down. I pulled off my ponytail elastic and shook out my hair to take advantage of the rising breeze. Edward dropped back suddenly, and I turned to see him bent over, his hands on his knees.

"Are you cramping? Do you want some water?" I asked, my hand going to one of the little bottles on my belt.

He raised his hand to signal me to wait a moment, and I stopped. I wondered if he had been acting like a typical guy, trying to show off by pushing himself too hard, and now it was catching up with him. He wasn't sweating, though, unlike me. I pulled at the fabric of my shirt to get some air on my back.

Finally, Edward straightened up. "I'm fine, thank you," he said. We started walking across the yard, skirting my DIY composter.

"Thank you for keeping me company," I said. "I have to admit, I was a little uneasy. But—" I paused, struck by a realization "—were you here yesterday, when I didn't run?"

"Ah," he said slowly, "remember how I said that everyone knows where you live? Everyone also knows that you have dinner on Wednesday with Justin Stanley's cousin's former boyfriend."

I groaned. Oh, for Chrissakes, why did I live across the street from the worst possible student?

"So," Edward went on, in what I took as an attempt to distract me, "Where are _you_ from, Miss Swan?" It was an echo of my question to him two days earlier.

"A little town called Laconia, in southwestern Arizona." We stopped at my porch.

"Laconia. How fitting," he said with a half-smile.

"Why? Because the Forks High mascot is the Spartan?" We were Sidewinders at Con High, completely ignoring the ancient-Greek origin of our town's name.

"Because you're … laconic. You don't give much away."

_Thank God for that_. "I'm a teacher – I'm not supposed to give much away," I said. I looked up at the darkening sky. "Are you going to be okay getting home?" I asked.

"Yes. It really is a quick trip through the woods. Good night, Miss Swan."

* * *

The next day, Edward answered another question in class, giving me a mumbled run-on sentence full of "likes" and "uhs." And a couple of hours later, he was waiting for me just at the edge of the forest. Once more he took the lead on our run.

On Fridays I often did intervals, and I was curious to see how this naturally gifted runner would react. I sped up for a spell, then slowed down to recover, and Edward Cullen just kept staying three strides ahead, no matter my pace. He didn't double over at the end this time.

But he did have another question. "Have you looked at 'Bel-Ami' yet?" he asked after turning down my offer of water.

"I haven't had a chance. _You_ might know 'Romeo and Juliet' by heart, but I don't - " really, some students seemed to feel that their teachers had committed all of Shakespeare to memory – "so I have to read that, and the books for my other classes. Maybe this weekend."

I didn't tell him that I might have sniffed the book a time or two to see if it had picked up his scent.

He raised his hands in apology. "Of course. I'm just curious to hear your reaction. Georges Duroy is such an unpleasant man, inconstant and manipulative…"

I narrowed my eyes at him, and shook my head, not caring, for the moment, about Maupassant's protagonist.

"You know, your code switching could give someone whiplash," I said. I had studied linguistics enough to know that everybody code-switched, even if they didn't know what that meant: Jessica Stanley and Lakshmi Mallory naturally talked differently to each other than to, say, their real-estate clients or yoga students; I automatically spoke to my friends and neighbors in Laconia in English or Spanish or a mix of the two depending on the topic or which language worked best for us.

But what Edward Cullen was doing seemed so studied, so deliberate, that my curiosity was piqued.

"Ah, you're one of the few who know my secret," he said.

"Your secret?"

"Your best students, are they girls or boys?" he asked.

"Girls. The guys seem to delight in being dumb jocks here," I said ruefully. Though to be fair, they did back in Laconia too.

"Exactly. A girl can be as articulate as she likes without drawing particular attention, but if I spoke that way in class, it would be noticed."

I nodded, thinking about Bruce Clapp's animus toward him and his brothers. It would be worse if the Clapp felt Edward Cullen was being a smartass know-it-all when he talked. And I suppose Edward wasn't always so tall, didn't always give off such an impression of coiled power. Maybe he got harassed by the jocks when he moved here from Alaska?

"I guess," I agreed. "But it's a shame. It used to be that girls had to hide how smart they were, and here it's boys." I shrugged. "Well, that should be a less of a problem for you in college."

"I'm certain of that," he said, smiling briefly. We were silent for a moment, and I reluctantly concluded that I should send him on his way. And I wouldn't see him the next day, I realized. I tried to ignore the pang of disappointment I felt.

"Um, I don't run on Saturdays," I said. "I go to Port Angeles instead."

"I'll see you on Sunday, then. Good night, Miss Swan."

It was only after he was gone that I realized that he had shown more knowledge of linguistic vocabulary than I would have given him credit for.

* * *

Lakshmi had a mischievous gleam in her eye when she described what we were going to chant in yoga class this week.

"I'm looking for a man," she said frankly as we all sat cross-legged on our mats in sukhasana, hands resting on our knees. "I know some of you are, too. So we'll chant together 'sat patim dehi parameshwara,' which in Sanskrit means, 'Please give to me a man of truth who embodies the perfect masculine attributes.' Inhale…"

As we chanted, I thought, I do need a man with the perfect masculine attributes. Attributes that men had. Adult men. Men who could vote and buy a drink without a fake ID.

Well, at least one who fit the bill was having dinner with me that night. Jacob Black showed up wearing the same white dress shirt he had on when he spoke to my class, a few new creases added.

"You don't have a TV?" he asked after he looked around my living room, and as all my visitors did, admired Raquel's paintings.

"Nope. I can't afford cable," I said, grabbing a beer from the refrigerator for him.

"Don't you want to watch UA football games?"

"No. And how did you know I went to Arizona?"

"The Spartan Spokesman."

"Gah! You saw that too?" I handed Jacob the bottle. You'd never know in Forks that the newspaper industry was dying.

"Yeah," he said, taking a swallow. "And I saw that –"

"If you say 'nice picture,' I will punch you in the face." I wasn't entirely joking, because that photograph of me in running briefs was still a sore point for me.

He laughed a little, and then had to wipe his mouth. "I was going to ask if you got shit for that picture," he said. "That's gotta be tough, having your students see that."

"Yes, I did!" I said, eyeing Jacob with a new appreciation. "And I think you're the first man who's realized that."

"That's 'cause I know the feeling. The ladieeeez are always objectifying me," he said, playfully striking a bodybuilder's pose, and making me giggle. "Also, I'm taking a class at Peninsula right now called Gender Roles in the Media, so I know all about the male gaze, babe."

We talked easily as I made dinner, roasted chicken and vegetables, and I saw that he utterly lacked pretension and was comfortable in his own skin – such a contrast to the artists I'd met last weekend in Seattle. Some of the vegetables he didn't recognize, and he was unembarrassed about asking me what kale was and what it would taste like.

I also found out that in addition to being a part-time student at the community college, he moonlighted as a car mechanic and worked for the tribal center, which was why he had given the folktale presentation. I asked him if he could speak Quileute, and he confessed that though he had studied it at school, only the oldest residents of the reservation spoke it with any degree of fluency.

As the main caretaker for his dad, he hadn't traveled much, but in the summer he had been able to go on a trip in a traditional cedar canoe with friends, traveling 40 miles a day to meet up with members from other tribes at the Swinomish reservation on the Salish Sea. It helped explain his callused hands and those biceps he showed off.

"Have you been taking care of your father for a long time?" I asked as I watched him take another helping of roasted chicken. The guy sure had an appetite.

"A while," he said, talking between bites. "My mom died in a car crash when I was 9, but my dad could still walk then – he was a fisherman. Then his diabetes got real bad when my twin sisters were still living with us. But they wanted to leave LaPush. Rebecca got married, Rachel went to school at Washington State. So it's been just me and my dad for a while. He's got real good friends who'll help out, though."

"My mom died when I was 9, too," I said.

He nodded. "It's rough, isn't it? What happened to her?"

"Cancer. She was sick for a while before."

"Oh." He looked puzzled, his eyes going to the equipment lined up on my kitchen counters. "So did your dad teach you how to cook?"

I snorted at the idea. "No, I mostly learned from neighbors. They were good teachers."

"Could you teach me?" He finally put his knife and fork down. His plate was a graveyard of chicken bones. "It's just that you look like you really know how to cook, and I'm don't know anything except how to put something in the microwave. And that's bad for my dad, what with his diabetes and all. And you're a teacher so you know how to … teach."

I cocked my head, considering. This could work out well for me. "How about this?" I said. "I'll show you some stuff, and you introduce me to someone who can speak Quileute and who'd be willing to talk to me."

"Why are you so interested?"

I fiddled with my own fork and knife a moment, then looked up at him. "Quileute is an isolate and so it hasn't been studied all that well, and maybe I could find out something interesting about it. And then I could write a paper and be a more desirable applicant for grad school."

"Huh. So you want to exploit my ancient culture for your own gain?"

"Um, not entirely for that, but yeah, to a certain extent?" I said hesitantly, not knowing him well enough to figure out if he was being serious.

He reached over to pat my hand. "Hey, I'm just messing with you. Actually, I think it's good for us to be studied – our language is almost extinct, I guess you know, the last remnants of the old ways are disappearing. The only way they'll survive in some form is if somebody records them." He took a sip of beer before going on. "There is also a lot of secrecy on the reservation, though. Before they let me talk to your class, I was told that there were some stories I couldn't tell, weird stories I'd heard around the fire when I was growing up."

"Weirder than –" I thought back to the tales he told in his presentation "– than a woman falling in love with a dog and giving birth to a litter of puppies that could shed their pelts?"

"Yeah, much weirder."

I was wildly curious, but I wouldn't have much luck as a field linguist if I couldn't demonstrate that I could respect a tribe's taboos, so I remained silent.

Jacob looked pensive for a moment, then said, "Tell you what, you teach me how to cook, and I'll ask some of the tribal council members about what you want to do. One of them is my dad, so I got an in." He gave me a wink.

I broke into a smile. "You've got a deal."

After dinner I said goodbye to Jacob at the door, pleased at how the evening had turned out. Jacob leaned down and kissed my cheek. It was warm, and soft, and sweet … and nothing. Like a kiss from my brother, if I had a brother.

Damn Edward Cullen.

I started stomping back to my kitchen to clean up but had to stop in the middle of the living room, in front of my mom's portrait, struck by my hypocrisy.

I had accused Edward of blaming the victim, and here I was doing just that. While I was cursing him for the drought in my sex life, he was the victim in this situation. I was the older person, the person in a position of authority, and I was allowing Edward to be alone with me when I was infatuated with him. He had obviously come to trust me, and I was unforgivably exploiting that trust. And that of his parents, busy people who probably didn't know what their son was doing with his afternoons.

So damn me.

Once I'd started the dishwasher, I finally allowed myself to open Edward's copy of "Bel-Ami." I guessed that he had found it at a garage sale, for the copyright was 1898 and the inside front cover had a bookplate that looked to be of the same vintage. It showed a Muse – Clio, I thought, with her scroll and books – and an "Ex Libris Elizabeth Anthony." I took a moment to consider this Elizabeth Anthony, maybe a privileged young woman smuggling racy French novels home from her Grand Tour of Europe, and never thinking that the day would come when nobody remembered her except as a name on a bookplate.

Dismissing the long-gone Miss Anthony, I plunged into the world of 19th-century Paris, filled with politics and mistresses and dinner parties, with people living beyond their means so they could climb the social ladder. As Edward had said, the hero was indeed inconstant and manipulative, but he was also young and handsome and easily manipulated himself – a boy toy for older Parisian society women.

After a few chapters I closed the book and pushed it away from me, its themes hitting too close to home. It was shameful: I kept worrying about how my crush on Edward Cullen was dangerous for me, but what I needed to think more about was how it was wrong for _him_. He should be spending time with a girl his own age, a smart, kind girl with a bright, long future ahead of her. He might have to wait to find her until college, but in the meantime he shouldn't be squandering his afternoons escorting me through the woods.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I would tell him to stop coming to meet me.

* * *

_Chapter title: "Running is my destiny," from "Clandestino" by Manu Chao._

So, one of the things that irritated me about the first "Twilight" movie was how Bella says that Edward speaks as if he's from another time, yet during the whole movie he's AdolescentMumbles McSqueakypants - even when they are alone. What's up with that?

And what do you guys think of Amazon's fanfic venture? I gotta say, that company sure knows how to screw over writers. John Scalzi's blog, Whatever, has some thoughts about Kindle Worlds, if you want to get some background.

I haven't seen the movie - I guess it got pretty bad reviews? -but "Bel-Ami" is a terrific novel, a fascinating portrait of 19th-century Paris. I recommend it.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!


	7. Tyngden i orden

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer._

N.B. The literary opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the characters, not necessarily of the author. Though Heathcliff _is_ a jerk.

Thanks to Camilla10 and Mr. Price, to HelloKoto for language help, RobsJenn for her rec and to Nic, Dolly Reader and Twific Crackmum for nominating this story at the Lemonade Stand.

Those of you who miss Mr. Price's comments from "The Bella Swan Scholarship Fund" have a treat at the end of this chapter. (Heh-heh, she said "end.")

* * *

Chapter 7: Tyngden i orden

I was sitting with Angela's family near the front of the church, waiting for Pastor Weber to appear, when I heard a rush of whispers behind me. I reflexively turned my head, and was arrested by what I saw: Esme and Edward Cullen, taking seats a few pews behind us. She smiled at me. Edward started leafing through the service book.

"Huh, I've never seen Cullens here before," Angela whispered. "And it's not even Christmas."

Pastor Weber made his entrance, and I forced myself not to peek at Edward again until after the sermon and the sharing of the peace. At this church, the peace was a time for hugs and socializing. As Angela's mom embraced me, I looked over her shoulder to see the Cullens isolated from all the handshaking and hellos, as if they were in a glass bubble.

"We can't have that," Angela murmured, looking in the same direction as I. Such a pastor's daughter she was. I headed to the Cullens' pew, and Angela followed.

"Peace be with you," I greeted them, shaking Esme's hand, and then, more hesitantly, Edward's. I startled a little at the feel of it, much warmer than I expected. Had I merely imagined how cold his skin was when he helped me up from the forest floor?

"And also with you," he answered in that impossibly smooth non-classroom voice of his.

A small squeak came from Angela, and I remembered her saying that Esme and Carlisle Cullen never visited the school. "Esme, this is Angela Weber, who teaches with me," I said.

"Peace be with you," Angela muttered as Esme took her hand. "Hello, Edward."

"Ms. Weber, good morning," he said softly, pulling his hand out of his pants pocket to shake hers.

"Bella," Esme said, beckoning me into the side aisle, near a stained-glass window with a jagged design that was probably supposed to represent tongues of fire, but they had little color in them on this foggy day. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Edward told me what happened to you in the woods."

Oh no, I thought, my stomach lurching. She was going to tell me to stay away from her son. Not only was I going to be deprived of Edward's company, I would have the humiliation of knowing that Esme disapproved of what I had done.

"My word," Esme went on. "To think how horribly it could have turned out!"

I looked over at Edward. He was wearing a dark gray suit and pale blue shirt that made him look all kinds of …. not 17.

It was cruel, really.

"I'm so glad that Edward was there to help you," Esme said.

"Me, too," I said back, still looking at my student, and waiting for Esme's "but." Edward gave Angela a brief smile as they chatted, a flash of white teeth that made me think of what the cougar could have done to me.

"So it would really make me feel better if he kept running with you."

What? I turned my gaze back to Esme, startled. "In case something else goes wrong," she was saying, her light-hazel eyes intent on me. "I understand you're an experienced trail runner, but surely it's safer for there to be two of you."

"Don't you –" I flapped my hands awkwardly, struggling to come up with the right words, especially since right now Esme and Edward looked more like beautiful siblings than mother-son "—need him in the afternoons to do his homework or his chores or something?"

She shook her head. "He has plenty of time to do what he needs. So please, Bella, for my peace of mind."

"Um, okay," I found myself mumbling, my resolve disintegrating.

Esme lowered her voice even more. "And I'm so delighted that he has someone to talk to. I'm sure you've seen how isolated he is. You are making him open up. Besides Alice, he really has no one other than you at his level."

I blinked, because to describe me as at Edward and Alice's intellectual level was flattery in the extreme.

"He'll see you this afternoon. At two?" Esme asked. I nodded.

"Thank you, Bella," she said, then stepped aside as Angela approached.

"Bella, we gotta go," Angela said. "My dad's making shooing gestures at us."

Esme had so discombobulated me, I'd forgotten my duties. She returned to her pew, and Angela and I scurried to start the collection. I deliberately chose the other side of the church from the Cullens, and as the Lutherans of Forks dropped checks and bills into my collection plate, I tried to figure out what I had just agreed to.

* * *

Whatever it was, it involved questions, I discovered.

"So, you should know, Sunday is when I do my long run," I told Edward at the start of the trail. "Tell me if it's too much for you."

He smirked a little. "I think I can keep up," he said. And after what I had seen, I believed him. I motioned him in front of me, as he seemed to prefer, and we took off.

It had turned into a fine day by Forks standards. The fog had moved off, a shower had cleared away, and the air was less heavy than usual. The sun even made a brief appearance.

My long route took me through a particularly ugly patch of clear-cut, and as I approached it, I saw prisms landing on the bark of the thinning trees – the sun refracting through the raindrops resting on the needles, it must have been. When I looked back at the path, my running partner was gone.

"Edward?" I called, a little uneasily, as I stepped into the sunlight.

"I'm over here," he said from the shade on the other side of the clear-cut.

I jogged over to him, counting my strides, and asked, "Where'd you go?"

"I thought I'd try a sprint to break up the run," he said.

"If you were on the track team, your coach would be scolding you for messing up the tempo of your long run."

He gave me a half-smile. "It's a good thing that I don't do track, then," he said, and moved off.

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why not, he was so gifted, as he had just demonstrated yet again in his 100-yard dash across the clearing. But I stopped, thinking of his social phobia or whatever disability he had.

Christ, maybe he was uncomfortable undressing in front of other boys. I shuddered to think of the horrors that Justin Stanley could get up to in a locker room.

I returned to my back yard tired but pleased with my pace – running with Edward upped my game, it seemed.

"What's your favorite novel, Miss Swan?" he said abruptly as we walked to my porch. I nearly snickered at the awkwardness of his question, like a conversation starter on an uncomfortable first date, but then I remembered Esme's words: _I'm sure you've seen how isolated he is. You're making him open up. _

At least he didn't ask me about the weather.

"'Pride and Prejudice,'" I answered.

"A bit of a girl cliché, no?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

"And all the male literary critics naming "The Sun Also Rises" or Don DeLillo as favorites isn't a cliché?" I retorted.

"Touché," he said, laughing, and I realized that he was teasing me. And, more disturbingly, that he knew me well enough to know _how _to tease me.

All those weeks he had spent staring at his desk he had listened to me.

"Why do you like that novel so much?" he asked. I hesitated, trying to organize my thoughts, and he added, "I promise, I won't make you give me an AP-standard five-paragraph essay on it."

Yes, that is what we spent a lot of time in class on. "I'm sorry you're stuck listening to all that," I said, grimacing. "That's a hazard of having to teach to the test. So … I guess I like it the way every _girl_ does. For the dialogue, and the dreamy hero – though he sounds as if he might be kind of unbearable in real life."

I waved that away. "But more important, it's because the clever, witty, strong woman succeeds - well, in a prefeminist manner of speaking - more than the beautiful, well-behaved one. And it's the beautiful, self-sacrificing women who 'succeed' in novels written by men, certainly 19th-century ones. Austen is a revolutionary, both in her view of women and her use of literary technique.

"But of course, because 'Pride and Prejudice' is a vision of love and family from a female perspective, it gets dismissed, and Austen doesn't get the credit she's due for how she advanced the English novel."

Austen's novel was, of course, also a vision of love and family and happily ever after that I never expected for myself. But I didn't need to tell my student that. Instead I looked at Edward and cocked my head. "Is that enough explanation for you?"

"For now, " he said. "I'll ask for the five-paragraph version next time."

* * *

On Monday, another apple was on my desk, and I still couldn't identify it. Some rare heirloom, perhaps, some Gravenstein-Spy-Topaz mystery. It was still delicious.

And after that afternoon's run, Edward seemed on the verge of asking me another first-date question. So I forestalled him. He was trying to get me to spill my guts without giving me anything in return.

"My turn, today," I said as we stepped into my back yard. The fog was back, and I wiped my damp face with my sleeve. "What's _your_ favorite novel?"

I wasn't sure what I expected – there was something about the way he wrote that made me think he had read a lot of Orwell or Waugh – but his answer still surprised me.

"'The Beautiful and the Damned,'" he said.

I considered a moment, trying to remember what I could about Fitzgerald's least famous finished novel, about a couple descending into alcoholism for the lack of anything better to do. It was a depressing story, and I could see how that might appeal to a mopey teenager. The problem was, I was having more and more trouble seeing Edward Cullen as just a mopey teenager.

"Why?" I contented myself with asking.

"When it came out –" he stopped as he reached my porch and turned slightly away from me. "I mean, it's the first novel I remember that takes a realistic look at a certain kind of people. Nobody has any goals, any direction, and their lives seem to stretch out endlessly before them. How do you respond when that is the case?"

"You become an alcoholic." Which was a stupid, stupid way for Fitzgerald's characters to look at life. Life does not stretch out endlessly. My mother had endured a lot of pain and misery to make hers last just a little bit longer.

"Exactly," Edward said. "If you have no meaning to your life, why not lose yourself in alcohol? Or give yourself up to some other vice?"

"Do you feel you have no meaning in your life?" I asked, watching him carefully. I flexed my foot against the porch steps, feeling the pull in my Achilles tendon. And here I was gazing at my Achilles' heel, my gorgeous fatal flaw, I thought.

"No." He turned to look at me again. "Though there was a time when I didn't feel that way." He shrugged. "I guess that's a change that comes with growing older."

* * *

"My turn," Edward said on Tuesday. "What is the novel you dislike most?"

I laughed a little. That was a trickier first-date question: what if the novel you despised turned out to be your escort's favorite?

I sobered up. We weren't on a date.

"It used to be 'Wuthering Heights,"' I said. "The cruelty, the irrational behavior, Heathcliff's torment of his wife, all justified in the name of a love that is unbelievable and unpleasant. And then the ghosts, and the overheard and misconstrued conversation ... cheap novelist tricks. It's as if Brontë had never read Austen."

"You are in good company among literary critics - especially the male ones," Edward said, grinning. He was teasing me again.

"Sometimes they manage to be right," I said dryly.

"I have to agree with you. Heathcliff's treatment of your eponym is unforgivable."

"Yes. Fortunately, my mother didn't name me after Isabella Linton."

"Whom did she name you after?"

"A many-great grandmother from Spain named Isabel," I said, silently noting his use of the disappearing objective case. He must have had an old-fashioned teacher once. "I've got a good bit of Spanish in my background. But I think my mom also just liked the name - girly names like Isabella and Jessica were popular when I was born, way back when."

I said that last part with a certain degree of bitterness – to Edward Cullen, it probably _was_ "way back when." He looked at me curiously, and I took a swig of water to escape his scrutiny and try to shake off my sudden bad mood.

"Anyway, Healthcliff," I went on. "He's a horrible person. But I have to admit, there's something about a man struggling with his inner demons, always on the line between evil and good, someone who can be dangerous, that is irrationally attractive."

Edward snorted. "I know the evolutionary biologists agree, but I've never understood that. The nice guy is always the better choice."

"Hmm. But boring, both in terms of evolution and as a matter of literature. The love that is illicit, forbidden, that's the one that's compelling ..." I trailed off, no longer thinking of Heathcliff. There was another reason that a forbidden love was compelling to someone like me – it was a love that didn't have to be acted on, that _couldn't _be acted on. It was, paradoxically, safer.

Edward was obviously thinking of something else, though. "Do you think that someone can change, that a person who has done horrible things can be redeemed? Or do you think it is impossible?" he asked.

"No, not at all. But he has to redeem himself. The romantic with a small 'r' notion that a troubled man can redeemed by the love of a good woman – I don't believe in that. What is more likely is that the troubled man will do something horrible to her, fail her when she most needs him," I said, my bitterness returning. Fucking Charlie.

We were silent for a few seconds before Edward observed, "You said 'Wuthering Heights' _used _to be the novel you disliked most. So what is it now?"

"'Dracula,'" I answered and saw a flash of something - surprise? dismay? - cross his face. Huh, maybe it was one of his favorites. "At least at the moment," I added. "I have to start teaching it to the 11th graders – you must have read it last year, right? – and I just don't see the point."

"You don't think it has any life lessons to impart?" He was smirking now, so I must have misread his expression before.

"About vampires?" I said, scoffing. I waved off the ridiculous notion. "I just think that 'Dracula' should be studied in college where everybody can talk about the sex freely. All I can do is go over the silly plot. And the treatment of the women is so … ugh, Victorian. All angel of the household and Madonna/whore. If I'm going to teach a Victorian potboiler to 11th graders, I'd much rather it be 'The Woman in White.'" I'd been introduced to Wilkie Collins's mystery at UA, and it had been a pleasant read.

"That's not surprising," he said, and I wasn't sure what he meant. "That you like 'The Woman in White,' I mean. Marian Halcombe is the less pretty, less kind one, and everyone who reads it falls in love with her, not her beautiful, dull half-sister."

"Got it in one," I said, and noticed how dark the sky was becoming. Arizona didn't have such short days. "Are you really going to get home before dark, Edward? Shall I drive you back?"

"No, I'll be home in no time. Good night, Miss Swan."

* * *

I had to wait through two days and a dinner with Angela, Tyler and Mike-the-guy-everyone-in-town-thought-I-was-dating Newton before I could return Edward's question.

"Okay, so what's the book you dislike most?" I shook my jacket out as we stood on the porch – a cloud had burst as we finished our run, and we had had to dash across my yard. Edward had politely matched my pace, and now his light gray T-shirt was splattered with rain. I tried to keep my eyes trained on his face, away from the wet fabric clinging to the lean lines of his torso.

"'Ulysses,'" he answered.

I couldn't hide my astonishment. Of everyone in my class – okay, of everyone I'd ever taught or been in school with, including my professors – I would have thought that Edward Cullen would have been the one to most appreciate the layers of wordplay in James Joyce's stream of consciousness.

"Joyce has no idea how people's minds work," Edward continued. He sounded annoyed.

"And you do?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Maybe I can read minds."

Wow, I thought. If such a thing were possible, that would explain so much about Edward. What would it be like to be constantly assaulted by others' thoughts? Especially if you were a particularly beautiful young man who attracted everyone's eyes? And then I thought of the humiliation that would be mine if the particularly beautiful young man next to me could read _my_ thoughts.

"How horrible that would be," I blurted out.

"Yes," he agreed grimly, and I had a moment of irrational panic until he went on, "To hear everyone's thoughts would be difficult to bear. Unless you could read just certain people's thoughts …"

"Like Picasso's, say," I mused, and I could have sworn he flinched for a millisecond. "Or Mozart's. To hear the music in his head."

"Perhaps. Though I understand he was quite odd in some ways."

"Oh, you've seen 'Amadeus' too, huh?" I said, grinning at the memory of the manic laugh of the actor who played Mozart in that movie. The campus film society had shown it one night on the Mall.

He must have been thinking of the same thing, because he smiled also. "I have," he said.

"Well, in any case you're in luck on Joyce. 'Ulysses' isn't on the syllabus this year. Or probably any year at Forks High."

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started, and I noticed how close my student and I were on my small porch – close enough that I seemed to smell his delicious scent, heightened by the humidity. If I lifted my hand I could touch a drop of rain resting on his forearm.

The smile dropped from my lips and I stepped back. "Edward, you should go before the skies open again," I said.

His smile disappeared too, and he nodded.

* * *

On Saturday, I met Jacob in Port Angeles after yoga so he could have his knives sharpened, and then we hit the farmers' market on Front Street for supplies for our afternoon of cooking lessons. I looked for the apples that kept appearing on my desk, but none of the farmers, even the ones with the most obscure varieties, seemed to grow them.

A farm intern at one of the stands gave me a heavy sack of potatoes for the food pantry at church, and Jacob easily slung it over his shoulder like, well, a light sack of potatoes.

"Hey, you're actually useful to have around," I told him.

He shook his head in feigned dismay. "I try to impress you with my brains, but all you can think about are my muscles," he said, bouncing the potato sack in emphasis.

Once we were at my house, I started with showing him the most efficient way to chop an onion and peel a garlic clove, and how to make chicken stock. We made marinara sauce without sugar, and baked kale chips. We put a chicken in the oven to roast and took bottles of beer out to my back porch to get some fresh air.

Or not so fresh, apparently. Jacob screwed his face up in disgust after a moment and glared out into my yard. "What an awful stink," he said, leaping up from his seat on the steps to pace in front of the porch.

"Don't say it's my compost pile," I said. "No matter what Sharon Stanley says, it's not my compost pile." My landlady had indeed complained about it, and after I expressed my displeasure that she was prowling my back yard and noted that dropping garbage off at the town dump wasn't free, we had parted on less friendly terms.

"No, it's not," he said, glancing at my composter. "You might want to move it, though, so it's not in the drip line of the trees."

"Is it a dead animal?" I asked. I hoped it was a dead cougar.

"Something worse."

"Skunk?" I suggested, though I smelled nothing but the usual damp earth around me.

He shook his head at me impatiently, and pulled at the collar of his T-shirt as if it chafed him.

"Um, so, any news on a Quileute speaker?" I asked, trying to draw his attention from whatever it was that was riling him up.

"Huh?" He stopped pacing. "Oh, yeah, come over for Thanksgiving dinner. You can meet my dad and Sue Clearwater, who's also on the council."

"You celebrate Thanksgiving?" Raquel's family did, but I knew that some Native Americans didn't.

"There's no turkey, and we hang a Pilgrim in effigy, but yeah, we celebrate it," he said, a smile briefly chasing away the disgust on his face.

"That's really sweet, but my friend Raquel will be staying with me –"

"Then bring her along," Jacob said promptly, before muttering, "We could use more women."

"What?"

He blew out a loud sigh. "Sue's son, Seth – he's 19, and still in high school - he and his friends are, like, joined at the hip, and they travel in a pack together. Or maybe like a cloud of locusts. They're huge, and food just disappears around them. So they'll all be there."

They must be the Wolves who demolished the Spartans in the homecoming game, I realized. And if _Jacob_ thought they ate a lot, they probably ate like literal wolves.

"I'll ask Raquel if she's okay with that. But –" I lifted a finger in warning "—if you're going to try to set her up with one of your musclebound buddies, you better be pretty subtle about it. She'll rip my head off otherwise."

"I won't try to set her up with any of Seth's loser thuggy friends, I promise. Even though I've never met her, I'm sure she deserves better than that. Now, could we go back inside?" He shot the forest one last glance. "Roasted chicken smells a million times better than whatever's coming from these woods."

* * *

Edward Cullen was in church again on Sunday, this time with Carlisle. They sat near enough to Angela and me that I could hear Edward.

"Let all mortal flesh keep silence," he sang. I loved this hymn, with its lovely, minor-key melody, but I stopped singing it to listen to his voice. It made me think of a silk wrap over bare skin. "And with fear and trembling stand…"

Again, Angela and I made a point of visiting the Cullens at the peace, and Carlisle winked at me. In approval, I had to think, but I couldn't ask, because this week other members of the congregation came to offer greetings as well.

"Everybody loves Carlisle," Edward murmured, but I nearly didn't hear, because he was holding my hand. He was wearing a different suit, a charcoal one with a barely noticeable pinstripe. The suit of an art expert at an auction house, I thought, reluctantly withdrawing my fingers.

After church, Charlotte Gerandy and I organized the week's donations for the food pantry in the parish hall. The sack of potatoes was already here – Jacob and I had dropped it off yesterday, along with the other donations from the farmers, since it would have been hard for me to haul it in on my own – and Charlotte and I carried in boxes of cans and bottles contributed by the Food Mart from her car.

We were arranging our meager bounty on the folding tables when Alice Cullen walked in, wearing a beautifully tailored raincoat cinched at her slender waist and carrying a large basket of apples … a large basket of familiar-looking apples.

"Alice, how wonderful!" Charlotte said to her, and I remembered that Charlotte's husband was a doctor at the hospital, a colleague of Carlisle Cullen.

"Mrs. Gerandy, Ms. Swan, hi. We've had a bumper crop from our little orchard this year, so Esme thought we should bring these by." She lowered the basket onto the table in front of us.

"What kind are these?" I asked, cradling one in my hand. "I've seen them around but I don't know what they are."

Alice shrugged. "Heirlooms of some kind. I don't know the name."

"They taste really good," I said.

"Really?" Alice seemed dubious. "I wouldn't know. Edward's always taking apples, but I don't like them."

"Too bad," Charlotte interjected. "You know an apple a day..."

Alice giggled. "All the apples in the world wouldn't keep the doctor away from our house, Mrs. Gerandy."

* * *

"An orchard, really?" I muttered after Alice left. In a few minutes, we'd open the doors for the food-pantry clients. A few minutes after that, all the food would be gone. To retirees struggling to stretch out Social Security, to men laid off from sawmills that would never reopen, to single moms like Eliza Teague's mother. The salal harvesters didn't come; they were too afraid to ask for help.

"The Cullens have quite a lot of land, I understand," Charlotte said. "And a beautiful house some miles north of town."

_Some miles north of town_. That's more than a few minutes' run away, I thought, then promptly forgot about that.

Because the real problem was that Edward Cullen was giving me apples. No. The real problem was that Edward Cullen … liked me, was infatuated with me, had the hots for me, whatever. I needed to stop that.

Yet how could I when I felt the same way? And worse, I felt even more for him than, I suspected, he could imagine or return. His crush on a teacher would pass, and he would move on, while I fell in love for the one time in my short life.

* * *

Chapter title: "The weight of words," from "Viljan" by Det Vackra Livet.

I meant to note in the last chapter that what Angela says about Social Security not being around when she retires isn't true. But it's a common perception.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!

_Mr. Price here._

_Readers of "The Bella Swan Scholarship Fund" may recall that I weighed in with the occasional comment, sometimes of a literary nature, more often along the lines of "when are they going to do it already?"_

_However much Mrs. Price has grown as a writer, Mr. Price remains fairly infantile, owing perhaps, to his being a "Mr." and not a "Ms." So I again ask, when do we get the lemons? Character development is all well and good, but let's get those fangs out and those clothes off._

_Also, Mr. Price is disappointed to report that Mrs. Price is rejecting his suggestions to "kink it up." The repeated references to Bella's back door and back porch are neither metaphor nor foreshadowing, I am sad to tell you, but just a description of how she leaves her house to go for a run. Sigh. (Still, I must say this is a really good story so far, anyway.)_


	8. Chu Jie

Disclaimer: "Twilight" belongs to SMeyer.

Recap: Last chapter, Esme persuades Bella, despite her better judgment, to keep running with Edward, who begins quizzing her about her literary likes and dislikes; the two also discuss the hypothetical drawbacks of mind-reading. Jacob and Bella cook together, and he invites her to La Push for Thanksgiving so she can pitch her idea to Billy and Sue for a research project. Thanks to Alice, Bella figures out that the apples that keep appearing on her desk are being provided by Edward.

Thanks for your patience. I had a lot going on the last couple of months. And thanks to Camilla10 and Mr. Price.

Also thanks to Nic for nominating this story for fic of the week at the Lemonade Stand. You can check it out the voting here: tehlemonadestand. net

* * *

Chapter 8: Chu jie

I picked up Raquel from the bus stop in Port Angeles, taking the opportunity while I was there to shop the holiday farmers market. I had consulted with Sue Clearwater, hostess for the Thanksgiving dinner Raquel and I were attending, on what to contribute to the menu, and she had laughed wearily into the phone and said, "Whatever you bring, and however much you bring, it will be eaten, so don't worry."

Raquel was initially resistant to visiting La Push - "I didn't leave the reservation in Sells just to go hang out at some other reservation," she complained. "Besides, you said you'd make me lasagna for Thanksgiving" - but had relented when I explained about the tribal council members being at Thanksgiving and the field linguistics project I hoped to do … and after I promised that I would indeed make a pan of lasagna for her.

Now we were at the Forks Diner with my usual Wednesday dining companions. At five, we were too numerous to fit comfortably in the back booth we favored, so we had to take a table in the middle of the restaurant, in the line of sight of everyone. The diner was bustling, full of Forks High students getting their last chance to hang out with friends before spending the next few days in the boring bosom of their family, and people picking up cobblers and pies for their holiday meals.

Mike and Tyler were typically, and suitably, impressed with Raquel's various charms, and were competing with each other to charm her in turn as Angela and I watched in amusement. As the boys bantered, my mind wandered to the day before. I had had my last chance to run with Edward Cullen before Raquel's visit, and my post-workout question of the day involved logistics, not literature.

"What are you going to do for Thanksgiving?" I had asked as I sat on the porch steps and dried off my right calf with a towel, my puddle-soaked running shoes tossed to the side. Edward's own shoes were, somehow, as pristine as they had been when he had set out.

"Hmm?" he said, sounding uncharacteristically distracted, and I looked up to find that he was gazing at my legs. The day was unseasonably warm, and I was wearing shorts.

"Thanksgiving," I reminded him. I considered covering my legs, but decided against it. I was pretty sure that Edward Cullen no longer worried about me harassing him. And as long as he didn't touch me and I didn't touch him, it was safe for him to look.

I hoped.

"We go off camping for the holiday," he answered me, and I let out a sigh of disappointment mixed with relief.

Relief, because I hadn't wanted to ask him not to run with us, but considering Raquel's reaction to the Cullens, I was certain that she'd be uncomfortable going into the forest with Edward. And to be honest, I was worried about what she would say about my spending so much time with a student. I might have the Cullens' approval, but Raquel would think I was crazy … and to be even more honest, I didn't want to give her a chance to persuade me she was right.

And disappointment because, damn, I wouldn't have even the possibility that I might run into him in town and get a glimpse of his beautifully sculptured face. Because it was okay for me to look, too, right?

"And what are you doing for Thanksgiving, Miss Swan?"

I draped the towel over my discarded shoes and stood up. "You remember my friend Raquel? She's visiting, and she and I have been invited to have dinner over in La Push."

He stared out into the woods a moment before saying, "Be careful out there."

There was an odd shading to his voice, and I asked, "What do you mean?"

He hesitated again. "It's a long drive on a narrow road to La Push. And some of the young men of the tribe have a reputation for being volatile."

_The young men_. He sounded like such an old guy sometimes. Jacob had talked about "thuggy" teenagers, but I couldn't imagine that the bad boys of La Push would be any scarier than my students in Tucson. Some people worried too much.

"Um, okay, thanks. I'll keep that in mind," I said, then smirked at my perpetual savior. "And you, don't get eaten by any cougars on your camping trip."

I thought he would laugh at that, but instead he responded, with dead seriousness, "Don't worry about me. Just stay safe."

A vaguely familiar voice from behind me ended my reverie with a "hey, guys!" It was Ben, the graphic novelist from Raquel's artsy commune, who came to stand next to our table, a couple of boxed pies in his hands. Mike, Tyler and Ben exchanged the usual bro-greetings, and Angela gave him a sweet, shy smile. I realized that Ben was the right age to have gone to school with them.

"Ben, congratulations on your book deal," Raquel said, and he did a double take as he noticed his neighbor from Seattle.

"Raquel, what are you doing here?" he asked before his eyes slid over to me. "And Bella!" he said. I could see the light bulb going on in his brain. He turned back to Raquel. "You never told me that your _girlfriend_ got her new job in Forks."

I could have sworn that the entire diner went silent, but it was probably just the customers in the two red vinyl booths next to us.

Raquel shrugged. "Yeah, well, I didn't know you were from Forks, so why would I have?" She draped her arm around my shoulders. "Anyway, it's sad that Bella lives so far away. Long-distance relationships are tough."

Okay, maybe it was the entire diner listening, because Raquel's voice seemed awfully loud in the sudden quiet. Shit.

"Yeah, I've heard that," said Ben. He now seemed aware that everyone was staring at us, and shifted uneasily. "Um, so, I gotta go pay for these pies. Raquel, let me know if you want a ride back to the city. See you around, guys."

The noise level in the diner began to ascend again as Ben moved away. Mike and Tyler looked stunned.

Raquel pulled her arm away. "I ought to give you a big wet kiss right now, Bella," she said, laughing. I smiled weakly at her.

"Wait," Mike said, his ears reddening as his eyes darted between me and Raquel. "Really?"

"No," Raquel said. Lowering her voice and leaning forward, she explained how she had led the commune board to believe that she and I were a couple so I could share her apartment, a subterfuge that was, obviously, coming back to bite me in the ass. "That means you have to keep it a secret," she went on, "so when Bella comes back to Seattle, she can move in. Though it's too bad I've got a 'girlfriend' -" she made quote marks with her fingers "- otherwise I'd ask Ben out."

I looked at her, surprised. "You should, but I thought you thought he was too short."

She started laughing again. "Who cares? He's a sweetheart, _and_ he's got a sweet book contract!"

Angela bolted from her seat and headed to the cash register.

"It's just like high school - she still has it bad for him," Tyler said, shaking his head and looking at Angela talking to Ben, and Angela's comment when I first met her that she liked nerdier types suddenly had a new dimension. "And Ben still has it for her," he went on casually.

"Ben and Angela had crushes on each other in high school?" I asked. Raquel made a strangled noise next to me.

"Oh, yeah," Mike said. "Ben was always pining for her, and Jess said Angela was always pining for Ben."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "And you didn't think you could, you know, facilitate the process?"

"Whaddya want, that I'd carry notes between them?" Mike said, scowling.

"No, but you could tell Ben, 'I think she feels the same about you.'"

He shrugged, and then our food came, and Angela returned to join us, so that closed off that topic. A secretive little smile curved her lips from time to time, so I wondered if her talk with Ben had been a productive one. Maybe her law student boyfriend in Seattle was on his way out.

Meanwhile, I was antsy and uncomfortable for the rest of dinner, paying attention to the conversation only when Tyler started complaining about the Border Patrol agents who were horning in on his traffic stops in search of Mexicans without visas. Otherwise, I couldn't help notice the glances being thrown my way, and considering what a common topic my doings were in this town, I suspected that my sexual orientation was on the gossip menu now.

As we drove away from the diner after dinner, I burst out, "I can't believe that we ran into Ben! My 'hot Seattle girlfriend' is going to be the talk of the town by the morning."

Raquel sounded baffled. "What's the big deal? It didn't bother you before."

"That was in Seattle!" I hit my steering week with a fist. "You realize, don't you, that Seattle is not really part of Washington, and Forks is definitely not in Vermont. You saw all those red bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot. Everybody's a Republican here."

"Do you really think it'll cause you problems?"

"I don't know," I conceded, sighing. "It certainly would have back in Laconia, but I don't know this place well enough." Maybe I wasn't giving my neighbors sufficient credit for their tolerance. And the truth was, there was really only one person I worried about thinking that I batted for the other team.

"Well, I'm sorry," Raquel said, but there mischief in her voice. "Because now Tyler and Mike will be mooning over you even more." I snorted, but she went on, "You're 24, you have fantastic legs, and you might be willing to put on a show with another girl. What straight man isn't into that?"

I grimaced in the dark at this description of my appeal, a generic appeal based on fleeting youth and health. I would certainly never be Edward Cullen's special snowflake.

And while I wasn't interested in Mike and Tyler that way, I felt compelled to defend them. "They're really nice guys, Raquel. Responsible. I could do a lot worse."

"C'mon, you had more chemistry with that creepy boy-genius student of yours, that Edward kid, than you ever will with Mike and Tyler." I looked at her in alarm. "It's true. I can totally see you two sitting around and discussing French literature and phomorphs together." I jerked my eyes back to the road so she couldn't see how right she was.

"Phonemes and morphemes," I murmured.

"Whatever. You know, when he's old enough to drink. Though he'll still be really creepy."

I made a noncommittal noise in my throat. "He'll still be a genius."

"I'm more concerned that your friend Angela probably thinks I'm an asshole, talking about Ben like that," Raquel said, cringing at the memory.

"She'll forgive you – she's one of the least judgmental people I've ever met," I told her, and lapsed back into my own thoughts. By the time I got home, I had decided that my fellow Forksians might be okay with my being a (pretend) lesbian, but they would definitely not be okay if I turned out to a real pedophile.

* * *

With Edward's plea that I be safe in mind, I drove carefully out to La Push the next afternoon.

"Poverty looks the same everywhere," Raquel said, gazing out the passenger side window at the reservation's trailers, tiny houses and rusting cars on blocks.

"I didn't realize there were a lot of salmon-drying racks in Sells," I said, tilting my head toward a wooden framework draped with strips of fish.

Raquel huffed, not in the mood to appreciate teasing.

Sue Clearwater's house was a red-painted wood frame of indiscernible vintage, but was what was really eye-catching about it was the pack of guys – Sue's son, Seth, and his thuggy friends, I assumed - playing a shirts-and-skins game of football in the yard in front despite the brisk temperature. Both shirts and skins were muddy, and I understood why when I saw a big, skidding tackle leave a furrow in the ground.

"Christ, it's a Kennedy family Thanksgiving football game on steroids," Raquel mumbled as we got out of the car with our cooler bags of food. Steroids was right, based on the beefy bodies on display.

"Bella!" Jacob Black stepped out of Sue Clearwater's front door.

"Hey, Jacob," I gave him a hug and looked up at him. He seemed taller than before, and I remembered reading once about how guys continue to grow until they turn 25. "This is my friend Raquel -"

"Oh, I've heard all about her," Jacob said, nodding to her, then looking back at me before putting his hand on his heart dramatically and feigning insult. "The secret girlfriend from Seattle. I am pierced to the core knowing that you didn't want to share this important aspect of your personality with me." He started laughing, and it was obvious that Jacob didn't believe the gossip. Nor did I think it would bother him if it were true.

"Fuck off," I said half-heartedly. "I just can't believe you heard that already."

"We get smoke signals from the Forks Diner, you know," he said, grinning. "'Course, I can make that joke, and you can't."

"But I can," Raquel said, and Jacob gave her a high five before looking over our heads. There was some sort of commotion behind us, and I turned around to see three of the football players struggling with a fourth whose neck and shoulder muscles strained impressively against their restraint.

"Is he going to turn into the Hulk?" Raquel asked. She wasn't joking.

"Um, why don't you two come in and meet my dad," Jacob said instead of answering, and taking our cooler bags, he ushered us inside.

Billy Black was a very large man in his 50s, so large his wheelchair seemed barely able to contain him; though diabetes had ravaged him, I could see hints of where his son got his good looks. Sue, I discovered, was a nurse and a widow, and her kind face was framed by a short crop of black hair shot through with gray. Also inside were Sue's gorgeous pregnant daughter, Leah, who was a little older than me and did office work at a casino, and her taciturn husband, Sam, a commercial fisherman.

As Jacob had promised, there was no turkey, but instead an impressively sized salmon laid out on a folding table. My contributions joined the huge collection of side dishes around the fish, and a few minutes after Sue called in the football players, all the food was gone, disappearing almost as quickly as it did at the food pantry at church. There was a lot of conversation and joking around, a welcome contrast to my stilted Thanksgivings with Charlie. Or with Charlie and his occasional girlfriends.

There were too many people for a sit-down dinner, so I found a perch near Billy and Sue, hoping to establish my bona fides and win their permission for my project.

"Do you know any Quileute yourself?" Billy asked around a mouthful of salmon after he had quizzed me about the fieldwork I had done with Professor Robles at the University of Arizona.

"No. I mean I've looked at it enough to see that there are eight kinds of Ks and a bunch of glottal stops and pharyngeal consonants that I'd never be able to say – "

"Huh?" he interrupted, understandably confused by my linguistics geekiness.

"Um, a glottal stop is sort of like, well, try to say "bottle" with saying the two T's in the middle, like a Cockney." I paused as Billy Black said "bo-el" experimentally. "And a pharyngeal has no equivalent in English." Here I made a sound that was reminiscent of a cat coughing up a hairball, and Billy and Sue flinched. "And that probably doesn't even come close to how it should sound. Anyway, what about you two, do you have much Quileute?"

"I don't, but some of the kids know more, like my boy, Seth," Sue said, pointing across the room to the huge football player who was being restrained earlier. He looked much more comfortable now, chatting to Raquel, crouched by her chair, his face happy and eager. He was making her laugh, which was interesting. It was the way to Raquel's heart.

"From school, right?" I said. "That's great, but my preference is someone who grew up speaking Quileute. Someone elderly, who maybe has some old-fashioned vocabulary?"

Billy and Sue looked at each other. "Old Quil," Billy said. "Let me talk to - "

A "What the hell?!" interrupted him. It was from Seth. His amused expression had been replaced by a glare – a glare directed at me. "You got in a car with the Cullens?"

Just as the diner had gone silent last night, so now did Sue Clearwater's living room.

I looked at Seth, mystified. "Yeah, they took me to Seattle. It was really nice of them. Raquel met them, too."

Seth leapt up from the floor then, hands clenching, and two of his buddies were hurriedly pulling him outside. "What's going on?" I asked Jacob, who had moved to stand in front of me.

He shrugged. "There's a history –" he started to say, but one of Seth's muscle-bound friends – what was his name? Not Paul, but Patrick, maybe - cut him off.

"The Cullens' property abuts the reservation, and we've had some arguments with them over boundary lines," he said, his voice hard. As he spoke, an animal outside howled about something. A deep-lunged dog, I guessed, since wolves had long ago disappeared from the Olympic Peninsula.

I stared at not-Paul skeptically. His tone was flat, as if he was reciting: I was pretty sure this guy had never naturally used "abut" in a sentence before. So, Edward Cullen was uncomfortable with the Quileute, and they returned the favor – why?

"Well!" Billy Black interrupted my thoughts. "As I was saying, Bella, Sue and I'll talk to the rest of the council and to Old Quil for you, and we'll see what happens from there." He smiled slyly. "It's the least I can do after Jake brought back so much delicious food from your kitchen."

Seth returned shortly afterward, clad in a new T-shirt, and headed straight to Raquel, leaving her side only when Sue ordered him and his friends to start cleaning up. But he joined Raquel and me as we were at the door, saying our goodbyes to Jacob and getting ready to return to Forks.

"What are you doing tomorrow, Raquel?" Seth asked, twisting a dishtowel in his large hands and grinning. It was as if he hadn't been dragged out of the house in a fury not so long ago.

"Volatile," Edward Cullen had said of the young Quileute men, and it rang true for me now.

"We're going to go hiking - what's the name of the trail, Bella?" Raquel answered.

"Kloshe Naniche," I said, sure I was mispronouncing it.

"You should come here instead - we've got the best virgin forest in the area," Jacob said, managing to make "virgin forest" sound dirty. "And our views are just as good as from the lookout at Kloshe Naniche." Huh, I wasn't that far off.

"Yeah!" Seth said. "We'd go with you and show you the trail." His boyish enthusiasm was such a contrast to his muscular frame.

I looked at Raquel, letting her know with my silence that it was up to her whether she wanted to spend several more hours with a moody teenager who had a crush on her.

Me, obviously, I had no problems with that sort of scenario, I thought ruefully.

"Sure," Raquel said, "if it's okay with Bella."

We made plans to meet the next day, and the minute I got my Civic onto the road, I burst into song. "And they call it puppy loooooooo—ve," I screeched.

"Nooooo. He's only 19," Raquel moaned, hiding her face in her hands. "And he's in high school, the horror."

My glee dissipated at her words. "Why are you being so close-minded? He's legal," I said, trying to hide my envy. She didn't know how lucky she was.

* * *

When we got home, I poured glasses of wine and Raquel and I sat at the kitchen table and talked about friends – my might-have-been hookup, Riley, hadn't sold much at the art show but was "keeping it posi" like the Portland-raised boy he was, she told me – and work.

"Do you need to write letters of recommendation for your seniors?" Raquel asked.

"Nah. My kids all seem to be looking at places that don't want recs," I said. Alice and Edward Cullen _should_ be applying to the kind of colleges that required letters, but they hadn't asked me for any, so I guessed they were sticking to Udub. Which meant that next year Edward would be in Seattle, and maybe I would be too, and … no. The girls here might not suit him, but in college he'd be surrounded by intelligent, attractive women his own age. I'd be old news.

But Raquel's question reminded me of some research I had been meaning to do, so I opened up my laptop and started typing. "Your curator, Bree, told me about this local foundation that gave her a full scholarship," I explained to Raquel, "and I'm trying to see if the people there might be willing to help a couple of my students. One's the daughter of an immigrant salal harvester here, and the other saw her father murdered. I don't think they'll manage college without a lot of help."

I found the Pacific Northwest Trust website, which had impressive graphics but little information beyond a contact name. "Hey," I said, interrupted Raquel as she texted on her phone, "what was the name of the lawyer guy who bought my nudie painting?"

I had to specify which painting because everything Raquel had on display had sold, one red "sold" dot prompting a cascade of other red dots.

"Jenks. Jason Jenks. Fapping to your portrait as we speak." I flipped her off, and she went on, "Why?"

Because Jason Jenks was the contact name. And he must have known about Raquel's show because of Bree, I realized. I didn't want to spoil Raquel's pleasure in her big sale by telling her that it might have started out as an act of charity. "Just wondering," I said, and started to compose a note to Mr. Jason Jenks.

* * *

The morning brought sun and the promise of good views on our hike. Even the marine layer had burned off by the time we met Jacob and Seth at the trailhead. Seth greeted Raquel as if she had personally brought the sun to La Push. The kid had it bad.

It was easy to see the difference between the virgin forest and the scrubbier, denser second-growth by my house. This was like walking through a cathedral, with the pillars made of centuries-old spruce trunks and the ceiling provided by the forest canopy 30 floors above us. Rays of green and gold landed around us, the leaves acting as stained glass windows.

And it was almost noisy here – when Edward and I ran, not even birds disturbed the silence. Apparently they preferred the mighty trees of this coastal strip when the weather turned cold.

We chatted easily, the guys telling stories of their escapades in these woods, Raquel and I describing the sky islands we'd hiked in the mountains around Tucson. We paused only when the elevation rose and we found ourselves on a cliff high above the Pacific, waves crashing on the rocks below, sea stacks in the distance.

"This is amazing," Raquel said, and Seth beamed at her approval. He bragged that he could jump off and land safely in the ocean, but Raquel begged him not to, and he shut up about it.

We settled on the cliff to eat the lunches we'd packed, and enjoyed the sun until it was too uncomfortable to sit anymore. Or too uncomfortable for Raquel and me – growing up here had apparently made the guys impervious to the damp cold.

The hike back was easier because of the descent but as we neared the end Jacob seemed to be struggling.

"Are you all right?" I asked him as he stumbled and lurched into Seth.

"Hey, man, what's going on?" Seth turned and held Jacob upright.

"My stomach," Jacob groaned.

I reached up and touched his cheek. "You're burning up, Jacob."

"Maybe you've got that flu that's being going around, the one I had," Seth said. Jacob glared at him, then doubled over in pain.

Seth grabbed Jacob's arm and slung it around his neck. "C'mon, we're not far from the car," he said, adding some words of Quileute that Jacob seemed to understand because he grunted out a "no."

Too bad Edward Cullen's not here, I thought, remembering how easily he transported me through the woods.

Still, Seth seemed comfortable supporting Jacob's bulk, and was able to guide the sick man into the VW Rabbit they'd driven. Jacob collapsed into the back seat and curled into a fetal position, poor guy. Seth pulled Raquel away to talk, probably to ask when he could see her again

"We'll take you home and put you in bed," I told Jacob.

"No," he muttered. "Go back to Forks, Bella. Seth will do it."

I guessed he didn't want to puke in front of me. I could understand that. I never wanted to puke in front of anyone myself. "At least call and let me know you're okay," I said, but Jacob only moaned again.

* * *

By Sunday, Jacob hadn't called. I phoned his house, but Billy answered and would say only that his son was fine but couldn't talk right now. Billy was so short with me that I didn't dare ask if he and Sue had met with Old Quil about my project.

In the afternoon, Ben came by to give Raquel a ride back to Seattle. Sharon Stanley managed to be in her driveway next to her shiny new Escalade – fruit of what Charlotte Gerandy had told me was Sharon's profitable ventures as a Forks landlord - and was watching avidly as Raquel and I hugged goodbye.

In a flare of irritation, I warned Raquel as Ben waited inside his car, "I'm going to give _you _a big wet kiss and shock the sensibilities of my annoying landlady." Yeah, I was a stupid straight girl willing to put on a show – good thing Mike and Tyler weren't here.

I positioned my hands on Raquel's face so they hid our lips and giggles from Sharon Stanley's view and we faux smooched for a few moments. When I peeked at Sharon afterward, I could have sworn her jaw had dropped.

* * *

"Oh, kill me," I groaned, opening my eyes to a Monday in Forks. It was too early – the sun wasn't even up, just a promise of a bleary light behind a wall of clouds – but I didn't want to go back to sleep. The dream that had woken me up was too disconcerting.

It was also risibly literal. I was at the school, in my classroom. Which was empty except for me and Edward Cullen. Who had me backed against my apple-laden desk, his lips moving on my neck, his fingers moving up my inner thigh, bare under a pleated skirt that gave him plenty of maneuverability. And then his hands were on my sex, stroking me just the way I liked, as if in my dreams he really could read my mind, sending me closer, if he would just move faster and harder … there, there, almost –

And then Bob Banner walked into my classroom, Edward Cullen had vanished, and I was trying to explain to my boss why I was sprawled on my desk with my underwear twisted around my knees and golden apples rolling on the floor. But the dream wasn't over. Bob wandered off, Edward reappeared, but our positions changed. He began thrusting into me, and just as once more I was on the edge, Barbara Goff showed up, looking censorious. Then it was Jeff Mason and his child-bride as Edward had his head buried between my legs. Every time, he disappeared as I was about to come, leaving me abandoned and in disarray. Finally, we were interrupted by my 11th graders, with Justin Stanley making catcalls. That was enough to yank me out of sleep.

Great. My guilty conscience had given me a dream that wasn't at all difficult to interpret. I pulled on my robe and went downstairs to make coffee.

The irony was that while I was dreaming of being indecent with Edward Cullen, everyone at school, Angela excepted, thought it was Raquel who was getting me off. Even the teachers' table at lunch went quiet a moment when I sat down in my usual chair, and Bruce Clapp seemed to have trouble looking me in the eye. But nobody said anything to me related to the subject until my last class.

"What do you think of gay marriage, Ms. Swan?" It was Justin Stanley, of course, lolling about in his chair and smirking.

The other students snapped to attention, expecting a declaration, perhaps, or a slapdown. They were going to be disappointed. "It's interesting that you bring that up," I told Justin, regarding him thoughtfully. "A little later in the year we'll be working on the persuasive essay, and that might be a topic you want to explore, if you're enthusiastic about same-sex marriage."

Justin seemed about to choke. "I'm not, not – I'm not enthusiastic about it," he said.

"Oh, that's fine," I chirped. "You can be conflicted about it. In fact, that might make a better essay, a more passionate essay, talking about your feelings –"

"I'm not conflicted," Justin ground out. "I'm against it." Lindsey Mallory was staring at him as if she had just learned something distasteful about him. Good for her.

"Okay," I said blandly. "Anyway, as I said, it's a topic for later in the year. For now, let's go back to the Van Helsings …"

* * *

My annoyance with Justin Stanley had faded by the time Edward and I started our cooldown that afternoon. A good run can clear your head, so instead of dallying by asking Edward how his camping vacation had gone, I decided to confront the gossip head on.

"Um, you might have heard something about me in the last few days that isn't true -"I hesitated, kicking the bottom step of my porch and trying to figure out how to put it.

"You mean, that you're an invert?" His voice had a smile in it, and I looked up at him to see it.

"Invert?" An even more archaic word than "icebox," probably.

He nodded. "Or do you prefer sister of Sappho? Daughter of Bilitis?"

I started snickering. "You make me sound like I'm from that Radclyffe Hall novel from the 1920s, what's its name - "

"'The Well of Loneliness.' You've been quite the subject of conversation at school. You would have been astonished to hear what Justin Stanley was -"

"Don't I know it," I interrupted him, and slumped against the porch railing, relieved by his nonchalance.

"Everyone thinks I'm gay too, and that's not true either," he announced after a beat, and I gawked at him. "Everyone's" gaydar was really off.

"Do people say that to your face?" I said, indignant. The folks here were so fucking nosy.

"No, but I can read their minds, remember?" he said, tapping his temple.

"Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten that." I sighed. "Well, I guess I'll find out if the 'news' causes me any trouble."

"Don't worry. Times really have changed, even in Forks." Edward hesitated, considering. "Except perhaps for Justin Stanley."

* * *

The fateful day had come: the Saturday of the Holiday Hop. I started the evening at Angela's house, where she updated me on her nascent romance with Ben while she and I had a couple of glasses of red to gear up for our chaperoning duties – at this supposedly alcohol-free event, the kids would no doubt be drinking more than the adults - and then we walked in the rain over to the Forks High gym.

It was seasonably festooned with handmade snowflakes and lots of sparkly tinsel … none of which could disguise the underlying odor of unwashed gym socks and teenage hormones. Ethan Yorkie was the DJ, trying out the sound system as Angela and I entered. "You make me feel like I'm losing my virginity the first time every time when you touch me," Katy Perry sang as if that were a good thing. Ouch.

"Not so loud, Mr. Yorkie," Bob Banner called out, drawing a line across his throat with a finger, and proceeded to give the teachers on duty for this dance our orders.

The students came in a trickle, and then a great clump, the girls in short tight dresses and cruel heels, the guys in jeans, sneakers, and, in a concession to "dressing up," buttoned shirts. The girls danced with each other at first, the established couples followed, and finally a brave boy approached an unattached girl, and the dance floor became crowded. Then the teachers had to start policing it, so Bob and Jeff Mason spun me around a few times as the students snickered at the sight of old folks like us dancing to LMFAO.

I was just returning from the girls' locker room – where I had confiscated a couple of suspicious-smelling Solo cups from Shelby Wells and Tiffany Crowley, giving them a useful lesson in discretion - when Alice Cullen popped up in front of me. She was wearing a venomous green dress with asymmetric seaming that no high school girl should have been able to pull off. With her was a tall young man with a cascade of blond curls, pale like her, though it was hard to be sure under the glitter provided by the disco ball.

"Ms. Swan, I'd like to introduce you to the love of my life, Jasper. I'm sorry he didn't have the chance to take your class, but he graduated last year," she said.

I automatically reached to shake his hand, but Jasper gave me a little old-fashioned bow instead, then said, "How do you do, Ms. Swan."

"You're old enough to call me Bella, I think, unlike Ms. Cullen," I told him, a little dazed. Yet another gorgeous, golden-eyed member of the Cullen household in a really nice suit.

"Yes, because he's _decades_ older than me," Alice said sarcastically before adding with a small gasp as she pointed at my outfit, "That's a New-Look Dior! I have one just like it!"

I looking down at my black dress, with its high neckline, fitted waist and full skirt. Maybe someone in the '50s would have found it alluring, but by current standards it was a nun's habit – perfect for my role at this dance. "I doubt it," I said. "I got it at a second-hand shop in Tucson, and it doesn't have a label."

Circlingg me, Alice ignored that. "If I adjusted the seams in the back, it would fit you perfectly, but the fabric's probably deteriorated by now …"

"I'm told that you have a gift for accents, Bella," Jasper said as Alice continued to survey my dress. "Can you guess mine?"

I was about to object that I couldn't do this when music was playing, but Ethan Yorkie turned down the volume just then at Bob's insistence, so I asked Jasper to tell me about college. He was taking classes at Udub and had plenty to say about them, but I had to concede defeat after a while.

"Southern, maybe?" I guessed. "I can't tell you more."

"Texas," he said, sounding pleased.

"Really, where?"

"Houston." He gave me a charming smile that was so contagious that I grinned back despite my failure. Oh, well, the Houston accent was mild as Texas went.

"You stumped me, congratulations," I said, realizing that I should move on. "Um, I'll let you and Ms. Cullen enjoy the rest of the dance."

"A pleasure to meet you, Bella," Jasper said, giving me another little bow.

"See you later, Ms. Swan!" Alice added.

By the time I made my way to Angela and the other teachers in our little ghetto in the corner, Alice and Jasper were twirling together in an actual dance with actual steps. And next to them was Edward Cullen … dancing with a 1940's pinup model.

"Who's the Vargas girl with Edward Cullen?" I asked Angela. His partner's red silk wrap dress was long-sleeved and knee-length, but it flowed so seductively over her curves that she put the girls in their strapless microdresses to shame. Blond and ivory-skinned, she looked made for someone as handsome as Edward.

"Rosalie Hale, one of the Cullens," Angela said as the girl in question started laughing in Edward's ear. "The one I wanted on the volleyball team."

"Of course," I murmured.

I watched as the two couples danced in their own bubble, the other students afraid to trespass upon their aura of beauty and grace. There was something otherworldly about them. If someone had told me right then that the Cullens were supernatural creatures or aliens from another planet, I'd have believed it.

They belonged in their own universe, a universe that precluded someone with faulty genes and limited prospects.

"Aw, dammit, Bob's waving at me. It's my turn to walk through the parking lot," Angela grumbled.

"I'll go for you," I said. "I could use a break from this awful music."

I pushed open the gym doors and immediately smelled smoke. There was a group of students out of sight around the side of the building whose conversation stopped as the doors slammed shut behind me. I paused at the top of the stairs and zipped up my jacket. Pot I'd have to do something about, because of the risk of a car crash. I sniffed again. Tobacco. It might ultimately be more lethal, but I could ignore it for tonight.

The outdoor lights reflected off a giant puddle the rain had left at the foot of the short flight of stairs to the gym, and I sighed and jumped, splashing my pumps in the process. Ugh. I began walking along a row of cars, dodging more puddles and hoping not to find anyone, but no such luck. Somebody was stumbling around the next row over, and I cut between two pickups to see who.

Fuck me; it was Justin Stanley, now next to the family Escalade and fumbling with his keys. I didn't know if he was out here to get a refill for his flask, or was planning to drive off, but I had to find out his state of inebriation.

"Mr. Stanley," I barked. He stopped short, and then turned around slowly, his face twisting as he recognized me.

"Isabella," he slurred, as he staggered toward me. Drunk as a skunk, so fuck me twice.

"Give me your keys, please," I said, holding out my hand. "We'll have your aunt come pick you up."

He ignored my request. "Do you like sex, Isabella?" he said, close enough now that I could smell the liquor on his breath.

_Yes, but with the wrong dream lovers_. "It's Ms. Swan. No, because I'm an English-speaker," I said to put him off balance, and his smirk turned into a look of bafflement. "You know, English has very few gender markers, so I find it annoying to study languages that assign genders to nouns that don't need it."

I could see Justin trying to figure out how to respond, and I had to suppress the urge to snort. "You haven't answered my question," he finally said, obviously thinking he was being clever.

"And you haven't given me your keys," I pointed out.

His eyes darted over my shoulder before returning to mine. "Aw, shit," he mumbled, and the keys fell from his fingers onto the asphalt, into yet another puddle – out of drunkenness, not defiance, I thought. Before I had time to decide whether I should make Justin pick them up or just get them myself, a pale hand snatched the keys from the ground.

"I have them, Ms. Swan," Edward Cullen said.

"Thank you," I said. "Go inside, Mr. Stanley."

After glancing at Edward, Justin Stanley, to my astonishment, headed toward the gym without a word. If I was lucky, Justin would have forgotten this whole encounter by the morning. I probably wouldn't be.

"I was going to get something from my car when I heard your conversation," Edward said after Justin lumbered off. The suit tonight was a fine charcoal wool, worn with a white shirt open enough so I could see the notch of his throat. He and Alice must have closets the size of a small house to accommodate their expensive suits and vintage Diors. "I was little worried that Stanley was going to embarrass himself."

"I think he's beyond embarrassment," I said unthinkingly. Dammit, I was badmouthing a student to another student. I winced as I looked up at Edward. "Um, forget I ever said that, please."

The side of his mouth lifted. "I can't do that. But I can promise you that I won't repeat it."

"Fair enough," I said, and we began walking back to the gym. "Are you enjoying the dance?" I asked after a few moments.

"Much more than I expected," he said. "And yourself?"

_Well, since you're here…_ "Same for me," I answered.

We had arrived at the puddle lying in wait before gym stairs. "Oh, this again," I muttered.

"I'll carry you," Edward said. "I've done it before, after all."

"Too bad you don't have your cape," I said, a little giddy at the idea of Edward holding me. I scanned the area for observers.

An odd sound came from Edward's direction, but when I looked at his face, it was simply puzzled. "A cape like Dracula's?" he asked.

"No!" I said. "Believe me, I try not to think about 'Dracula' outside of class. No, I mean Sir Walter Ralegh, you know, putting his cape on the puddle so Queen Elizabeth won't get her feet wet."

"Of course," he said. "I should have realized. Here, I've got you."

Edward lifted me up in his arms, but unlike last time, he held me pressed against his chest, the hard chest of someone who could run like the wind and leap over a giant puddle with a heavy weight clinging to his neck.

Which is exactly he did, so that we arrived squarely on the landing next to the gym door. He let me down, and I laughed in exhilaration. "Of course, who needs a cape when you can fly like a bat, Count?" He looked perturbed, and I said, "Hey, you're the one who mentioned Dracula. Anyway, thank you."

He held the outside door open for me. "You're welcome," he said, but didn't follow me inside. Flashes of light bled from the other set of doors.

"You're not coming in?" I asked, even as I realized that it was probably best that he didn't.

"I still have to go to my car," he reminded me. "But first –" he took my hand in his, still cold from the puddle, then closed my fingers around Justin's keys. "You'll need these."

My hand tingled as I hung up my jacket and took the keys to Bob. He cursed under his breath when I told them whom they belonged to. "Sharon Stanley is going to screech at me," he complained.

"Just tell her it's my fault," I said. "She dislikes me anyway."

Bob went off to corral Justin, and I returned to Angela's side to give her an edited account of my encounter with Justin Stanley.

"That guy is going to cause one of us trouble some day," Angela said. Her disapproving head shake ended with a jerk as the real guy who was going to cause me trouble appeared in front of us.

"Good evening. Ms. Weber," Edward Cullen said. "Ms. Swan, may I have this dance?"

I gaped at Edward and his lovely suit for a moment, thinking that it was a really bad idea to dance with the student my best friend said I had obvious chemistry with … then realized that it didn't matter because everyone thought I was gay. Even more, apparently a good proportion of the student body thought that Edward was gay too. As long as I didn't make Angela suspicious, I'd be safe.

"Of course, Mr. Cullen," I said, smirking at the knowledge that the person it was most dangerous for me to touch was on the surface the safest.

The song was slow, and the couples on the floor were pressed up to each other like limpets; I pretended not to notice Andy Marks's hands on Shelby Wells's ass. I prudently put one hand on Edward's shoulder and he took up my right hand with his left. His right hand curved around my waist, and I inhaled sharply – we were touching only at four, safe, points yet that contact felt more intimate than all of the groping going on around us.

I closed my eyes against the feeling, against the urge to brush my lips against the ones so tantalizingly near mine. The thought made my heart race. This was the last place I should lose control.

"Do you like this song, Miss Swan?" I heard Edward ask.

"Hmm?" I blinked up at him. "I don't know. I don't even know what it is."

"Who's your favorite musician?" he asked.

Ah, we were returning to our post-run 20 questions. Most recently, we'd been discussing "Bel-Ami," and I'd once asked him about the translation of a sentence I couldn't figure out. I wouldn't make that mistake again: he had smoothly explained the meaning, but I couldn't follow it because hearing him speak French had made my knees weak.

"That's a tough question," I said, grateful to have something to concentrate on besides how close I was to the inappropriate man I had fallen for. "My mom could have told you that her favorite band was Depeche Mode. My grandmother could have told you it was the Beatles –"

"Your grandmother's favorite band was the Beatles?" Edward sounded incredulous. Come on, kids now were snotty about the Beatles?

I shrugged. "Or José Feliciano, more likely. I don't know, I never met either of my grandmothers. The point is, they bought albums and listened to them over and over again. And I get free downloads of songs, and have a computer full of singles by hundreds of different bands. How could any of them be my favorite? So I don't know. Maybe the National. Maybe Bomba Estéreo. Maybe the xx. Maybe my friends' band back in Tucson. What about you?"

"Bach," he answered promptly.

"Ooooh, you've definitely trumped me on the cultural pretension scale," I said.

"I don't know. The National is certainly pretentious. Besides, you like Philip Glass."

I eyed him. "Why do you say that?"

"I've heard you play him when I've walked past your classroom."

The boy was lying, because I played Glass only at home. But it was the reminder of my classroom, of my role as a teacher, that made me freeze in Edward's arms. I automatically glanced toward Angela, and then let out a sigh of relief: Alice and Jasper were talking with her, so she was too busy ogling Jasper to pay attention to Edward and me. Still, I shouldn't press my luck.

"Thank you for the dance, Mr. Cullen," I said and stepped back out of his grasp.

He stepped closer to me. "You don't have to run away from me, Miss Swan," he said quietly. "Don't run."

_Oh, yes, I do,_ I thought. But it was becoming more and more obvious to me that I wouldn't. One day I would fall off the precipice of proper behavior, and Edward would be there to catch me. Then disaster would follow.

Not acknowledging his words – because I shouldn't acknowledge them – I scurried to the safety of the teachers' corner.

* * *

Chapter title: "Borderlands," from "Tchu djie," by Mars.

A/N: Historical linguists say that Texan accents as we know them today didn't develop until decades after the Civil War, thus Bella's inability to identify Jasper's. I am also wildly overstating the amount of Quileute being spoken at La Push.

Washington State approved same-sex marriage in 2012, shortly after the events of this chapter.

As for Raquel and Seth, I think that under the rules of SMeyer's universe, the wolves would imprint only on genetically similar women – ie, women who are Quileute or from closely related tribes - and therefore Raquel wouldn't qualify. On the other hand, Jacob thinks he can imprint on a random girl at the mall in "Breaking Dawn," so I decided Seth can fall for Raquel in my story.

My apologies to fans of Katy Perry, who is quite good in concert. But that song is moronic.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!


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